


Condemned

by OxfordOctopus



Category: Dishonored (Video Games), Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Disasters, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Plague, Rats, urban decay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-13 17:00:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29405178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Taylor just has to survive. It's all she can do, and it's all that she needs to do.She just hopes it'll be enough.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 55





	1. Containment 1.1

The water was harsh against her hands, a mixture of too hot and too full of soap to be doing anything good to her skin. Still, she ignored the dull pain and kept scrubbing, dragging the prickly sponge against the rough grit that had adhered itself to the lip of the ceramic plate. It gave, bit-by-bit, beneath her buffing, until finally the bigger end of the chunk fell away, popped clean and free from the surface.

Gray light filtered in through the window in front of her, casting what wasn’t illuminated by harsh light bulbs in a bit of a gloomy spectrum. Between the suds, the gray, almost brackish quality of the water itself, and the fact that she had worked through the majority of the dishes by this point, she had to sink her hand deep into the water to find another target, propping her cleaned plate up along with the rest of them.

Taylor’s eyes scanned up and caught against the window in front of her. There wasn’t much to see from this part of the building, just a stretch of muddy lawn that aborted rather suddenly in a chainlink fence, behind which were damp, dark trees, the overcast not giving enough light to see deeper into them.

It had been a week since Leviathan hit Brockton Bay, and it felt like it’d been months, and yet mere hours, at the same time. Seven whole days, each one longer and shorter than the last; if not for the actual passage of time, the sun moving, her body fatiguing, she wasn’t particularly sure she would’ve noticed it.

Then again, that wasn’t exactly unexpected. A lot of things happened, enough that she’d ended up in a shelter, one not even too far from where her home used to be.

Her eyes refocused, as though at the mention of it, the forestry and wet grass dropping out of clarity while reflections drew back in. She saw herself, first, face neutral, staring back at her from the window, a little thinner around her cheeks than she remembered being, and then she saw the other two occupants of the room.

One was next to her, shorter by a head. Her name was Piper, and she was a skittish sort of girl. Withdrawn, at best, as evidenced by the fact that she kept such a wide berth from Taylor that she had to reach over at a diagonal to access the sink she was working with. They were roommates, though Piper wasn’t her only roommate - Cleo, Marlon and Edith making up the others - and from what she’d seen in the girl’s trunk the few times it had been open in her presence, she’d gone to Immaculata - a local, rather expensive Christian private school - before she’d ended up in the shelter.

It didn’t take much to imagine what might put her here. She could relate, something similar to it had happened to her.

The other reflection was further back. A small boy of five, Aiden sat on the box Taylor had originally placed him on when they’d arrived. His face was scrunched up, nose wrinkled, as he did his best to read through a children’s book, stubby fingers gripping either flap of its cover. It was good that he could distract himself, she had been worried he’d get bored and frustrated while she worked.

Aiden was, in every sense of the word except legally, her ward. She took care of him, in large part because he refused to leave her side. He ate with her, he did his own thing while she did chores, but he never quite let her get out of sight, or at least not for too long.

The boy’s gaze peeked up, glanced briefly at her, just to check, then lunged back down to the page, his face creasing.

Eyes slipping back down to the grayish waters in the sink, Taylor sunk her hand further in, found purchase against a tall glass. She pulled it up from beneath, letting the water pour in dribbling currents out of it, splashing a bit against the front of her shirt. The bottom of the glass had a bit of grime buildup on it, though thankfully not the hard, stone-like grit that ended up on most plates before she got her hands on them. A few harsh scrubs with the sponge and it came away, flaking back down into the water below.

She got it soapy, after that, lathered it up with the sponge not meant to sandpaper away at unmentionable bits of fossilized food, and then rinsed it off without much fanfare, stacking it up along with the rest of them.

Just as she was reaching for the next dirty dish, the door behind her clattered. Her eyes drew back up, caught on the reflection of the door, and watched. The knob moved at first, a few awkward twists as it stuck, before finally giving. The door creaked open, old and unoiled hinges protesting every bit of motion, and a head emerged from the sliver of space that had been provided.

Taylor turned, fully, and found Leah Hampton staring back at her.

Leah was the leader of the shelter, and a woman in her mid-thirties. She was about as tall as Taylor was herself, with close-shorn, brown hair and a stern expression. She’d introduced herself first as “Hampton” - and that was the only reason Taylor knew her last name, she certainly hadn’t asked for it - before she had clarified, with an awkward, almost shy sort of expression, that her name was Leah. Leah Hampton.

From skin to bone, Leah was a military woman. It wasn’t that she was butch or even conventionally masculine; despite the short hair, she wore feminine clothing, and it hung from her body in a way Taylor knew it probably never would for her. She had what people probably thought of as the _appealing_ sort of tall among girls, mostly found in the legs, though Leah’s frame had been filled out by muscle that somewhat took away from the willowy look she had.

She was a stern lady, but not an unkind one. Hard edges, yes, but ones that came from her experience in the military, by Taylor’s estimate. It wasn’t hard to see where training had come to replace mannerisms and tics, but it wasn’t any harder to dissociate them from how she treated others.

“Taylor?” Leah said at last, pushing the door fully open even despite the hinges screeching in outrage. She didn’t let it close - a small mercy - and rather kept it open with one arm, staring curiously at her. “You’ve been here all day—and I think you’ve done more than enough. You and Aiden should take a break.”

Leah was like that. She pushed people, certainly, but not beyond their limits, and maybe there was some truth in what she was saying. The words almost seemed to prompt it, but she was noticing how bruised her hands felt, tender to the touch and faintly irritated, inflamed. She felt a bit sluggish, though she wasn’t sure if that was from all the work or not drinking too much. Clean water wasn’t exactly in a surplus, not after Leviathan.

Her eyes flicked towards Aiden, who was glancing at her, up from her book. He was looking at her for guidance, for support, eyes a little too wide, a little panicked by the sudden change. For a moment, she could remember seeing those same eyes, but before the memory could fully surface, she shoved it down.

There was no use in thinking about it, it was unproductive.

Out of the corner of her eye, Taylor caught Piper nodding, agreeing in the quiet way she normally did. It was about all she could expect from her, really. Not that she was mean to Piper, or vice-versa, but she wasn’t the most social person in the first place, let alone after all that had occurred in the past week. It was a small wonder that she managed to get along with her roommates at all, especially when most people saw her as unapproachable and cold.

Still, between Aiden and the ache in her hands, not to mention not wanting to make a scene, she couldn’t do much besides go along with it. Drawing her remaining hand free from the water, she pressed them into the nearest towel, hiding a wince as rough material dragged against too-sensitive skin.

Turning back to Leah, Taylor tried not to dwell on the appreciative smile she was sending her way. A soft smile, one she didn’t really feel ready to receive.

Aiden was already in motion, shuffling himself forward until he tipped over and off of the box, landing feet down on the floor with a soft, if pronounced clap. He tucked his book under his arm, wrapped both of them around it like he was holding a log from its middle. A mannerism he’d picked up from her, she noticed, though not one she had hoped to see. The only reason she’d gotten into the habit of holding things that way was because, back when school was still ongoing, it’d been the only way to keep others from stealing them right out of her hands.

Not that it was productive to dwell on things that didn’t really exist anymore. She didn’t know about her future, but she sincerely doubted Winslow was going to play much of a part in it.

“Thanks for reminding me,” she said at last, getting the words out one at a time. Talking was harder, more rigid, she overthought things more frequently nowadays. Most of them were concerns about the wrong word implying something about herself, or might give too much away about how she was feeling.

“It’s not a problem,” Leah smoothly replied, leaning back against the door, using her spine to keep it wedged open. “Though, if you want to repay me for it, can you consider coming to the bonfire tonight?”

The bonfire, right. They were planning on having one every week, just a day for people to go and gather around a big pile of burning logs and talk. She hadn’t gone to the first one - the one which had presumably started the entire tradition - in large part because she was still getting settled with Aiden at a time.

Her eyes moved to him. Aiden’s face was a bit hopeful, a bit curious, but hard to read otherwise. He was staring rather obviously at Leah, huddled alongside his book.

Her gaze returned to Leah, and her smile, if anything, had only grown softer, more serene. Happy for her, almost.

“We’ll try to make it down,” Taylor conceded, instead of anything binding. Leah and Aiden’s face both lit up a bit, though the former certainly much more than the latter.

Leah clapped her hands together, scuffing them back and forth without much friction. “Good! I’ll see you around, though. I’ve got work to do, just wanted to peek my head in. I’ll send David down to finish off the rest of Taylor’s dishes, okay Piper?”

“Alright,” Piper’s voice came, a bit quavery, and particularly quiet.

Leah just beamed another smile before turning back around, the door managing to remain open despite the weight of it. Probably due to the hinges, now that Taylor was thinking about it.

It left just her, Aiden, and Piper, now. The soft clattering of dishes and bristles dragging against ceramic filled in the background as Piper’s work picked back up. Despite her timid temperament, she was a hard worker; Taylor could give her that much.

Striding forward after giving her hands another brief towelling, she drew to a stop just in front of Aiden. He looked up at her, and she leaned down a bit, just enough to be close.

“You ready to go?”

Aiden nodded, bobble-headed and eager. Not unexpected, even if he’d managed to make it through hours of boredom with his book, she was hardly expecting him to enjoy every last second of it.

She pulled herself back up into a stand, and departed the same way Leah had. She listened for Aiden’s footsteps, keeping close behind her; her little shadow, she had heard people calling him, and it wasn’t exactly an inaccurate sentiment.

The concrete corridor that led to the dish pit in the first place was mostly without windows, just a long stretch of rectangular hallway that led towards the kitchens at the far other end. The walls did, however, have doors, and she took the first one on the right, a pair of them, pushing them open with a grunt as she stepped out from inside and into the open air.

The refugee camp - which was what it had become, after a point - was constructed around the building, which towered in its center. Tents extended out from the building like spokes on a wheel, ending only when they met either the fence that penned in the right half of the area or when it was about to reach the open road.

People moved in large clumps, walking between tents, carrying objects and supplies in groups. There were about, by her estimate, four-hundred or so people here, making it on the smaller side, especially considering the downtown shelter was housing eight thousand or so people if rumours were to be believed.

The tents themselves were set up along the grass that encircled the building itself, grass which had long since been stomped down into the mud below. The sky was overcast, as it had been for the past week at the very least, and the consistent rain had drowned what hadn’t been pulped by boots and shoes. Even the trees were struggling, some of them already partially uprooted from Leviathan’s waves, now anchored in muddy, not particularly stable soil.

Dreary skies aside, it hadn’t rained today, only really threatened that it might. She hadn’t seen the sun in a week, but she could almost spot it now, looking up, where it tried its hardest to cut through the clouds.

There was a tug on her sleeve, small and timid, drawing her focus back in. Aiden was looking up at her, brows furrowed, a little annoyed that she wasn’t getting on with it. It made her smile, just the slightest bit, the most she could force herself out of her comfort zone for the time being.

Aiden, in turn, smiled back at her.

Turning her gaze away from the surrounding area, she started walking. She kept to the raised, concrete path that encircled the building, a pathway that had probably been made mostly for aesthetic purposes, but was now very much a benefit to have. Between the rain and the variety of damage left over, the earth was more sludge than solid earth, and it was easy to get lodged inside of it if you stepped down too hard. People had adapted, of course, they’d put out tarps across the ground and nailed them down - for what little it would do - to prevent people from sinking too far in, but there was only so much you could do that wouldn’t involve actually building something to compensate for it.

The walk around to the front of the building was short, under a minute, with Aiden keeping to her heels for the entirety of it. The front doors were always left open, and Taylor stepped past the little plaque at the front of the building and through them, right into what had once been an open chapel.

Or, at least, the open space certainly resembled what she remembered of chapels. It was long, with a raised platform at the far end you could reach by climbing a few stairs. Where rows of benches had once been, in their place now sat tables and desks, with people stuffed behind and into them. They worked quietly, but not silently, murmured conversation carrying through the high roof of the room, reaching all the way back to her, if as little more than unintelligible noise. Tall windows framed the far wall, but let in little light, the stained glass barely lit from behind as it soaked up what light could even make it down from above the clouds.

She ignored them, glanced back to see that Aiden was still following after her, and kept to the wall, walking left until she got to the doors leading into the left wing of the church. She pulled them open, both for herself and Aiden, though shooed him in first before following after him, letting them swing shut behind her.

The hallway was long, much longer than the one between the dish pit and the kitchen, and split off into branching paths. Other rooms, occupied by other people, separated by heavy oaken doors. Hers was at the very far end, the last of them, and she kept her pace slow enough that Aiden could keep up, yet not so slow that they passed her by in a crawl.

She twisted the knob to the door, and pushed it open.

The room inside resembled the barren qualities that made up most of the church. The walls were stone or at least concrete meant to resemble it, and the floors were made from wooden boards. The roof was flat, and left the entire space feeling painfully cube-like. Altogether, it was about three or four times the size of her room back home.

She was alone, thankfully. None of her roommates seemed present, or even recently present. It wasn’t like she didn’t get along with them, but there still existed friction among each of them. Not a lot, but enough to make it harder to focus around them. It didn’t help that their personalities were so mixed, and while it was one thing to tolerate each other, it was another thing altogether to ‘get along’, as was expected of them.

Five beds, one of which was hers, sat in it, spread out to get as much distance from one another as possible. They all had trunks at the end, though her own went largely unfilled, mostly because she didn’t have much to fill it with. Her bed was as spartan as the rest, and the only thing that made it even remotely different was the jacket she’d thrown over it to act as a second layer, after Aiden had complained of being a bit cold the night before.

It was her dad’s. It was hers now though, she supposed, considering he wasn’t around anymore to claim it.

She still didn’t really know why he did what he did. They had made an agreement, even before Mom had died, that they’d go to the Endbringer bunker first - in the event one came - and not try to go back for each other unless it was absolutely clear that one of them was stuck. They’d reconvene, later, back at the house. She had thought he had maybe gone to another shelter, but when she’d gone back to the home, to see if he was waiting for her, she’d found him mostly buried beneath the wreckage of a house he hadn’t ever quite managed to pay off, not entirely.

Had he been looking for her? Even against what they’d agreed on? Had he gone back for something else? If so, what was so consequential that it was enough to risk it? To die like that?

She didn’t know. Probably never would.

The grief was still raw, still sat at the edge of her awareness, but she was decent enough at stuffing it down, letting it wait for later.

Aiden passed into her line of sight, walking right on by, up to where he’d left his brightly-coloured red backpack next to the bed. He unzipped it with clumsy fingers, and stuffed his book back inside of it.

Aiden’s mom - his only parent - had died, too, but differently than her father. She’d been there to watch it happen, in that Endbringer bunker. The Slaughterhouse 9, somehow, had hidden in it, and something had happened, something big enough to make whatever they had been using to hide themselves wear off and replace a bunch of nondescript civilians with the faces everyone learned to fear and hate. Something big enough to make her spontaneously gain powers.

She didn’t know a lot of things. Not about her dad, not about why the Slaughterhouse 9 was there in the first place, though she could make a guess. Her bet was that they’d figured out how to predict the Endbringers somehow - it didn’t seem entirely out of possibility - and wanted to make a sport out of it. A game.

More than half of the Slaughterhouse 9 had died. Jack Slash, Bonesaw, Shatterbird, Cherish - apparently Heartbreaker’s kid of all things - and someone by the name of Burnscar. Killed by terrified civilians. The ones who hadn’t died, Mannequin in particular, had carved a bloody canyon through the civilians. Mannequin had been the one to reduce Aiden’s mother to chunks while he watched, while she watched.

She didn’t remember much of the incident, too much of it was a panic-filled blur, but she remembered finding Aiden, picking him up—hauling him away from the corpse of his only parent. Holding him close to her chest, and climbing out of that shelter alive, but alone. Not that she had known it yet.

The rest, as it was, was history.

The room felt a bit cramped, though, and this was why she never liked thinking too much about that day. About being trapped, about being crammed in among so many other people. It made her throat constrict, made her want to call out for help when she knew nobody would respond. Made her crave the open air, even if it always came as humid, foggy excess.

She breathed in, out. Choked a little on her own breath. She kept herself calm, her face blank, a skill that had come easy after that incident and with time was becoming increasingly easier. Neutrality was not a look that flattered her, but it was one she could wear comfortably. She mustered up the willpower she had to have now, that was _required_ of her.

“Maybe we should go for a walk?” she said, into the open air.

Aiden blinked, turned to look at her. It was in moments like these that she had the inscrutable sense that Aiden _got it_ , that he saw or noticed more about her than he was willing to admit. He wasn’t a talkative kid, not even on his good days, and he had more bad ones than good ones, not that she could blame him. But it was in these quiet moments, big brown eyes staring at her, almost through her, that he felt more intuitive than he let on.

Instead of saying anything, though, he just nodded. Reaching down, he zipped his backpack shut, shuffled it back beneath the metal frame of their bed, and wandered back over, looking up at her quietly.

Her eyes jumped to her coat. It got nippy at night, if only because of the humidity, but it was too warm now. It’d be unpleasant.

Even if Dad’s scent on it made her calmer, grounded her, made it so that it felt like he wasn’t dead, he was still around, she could do without it.

She turned, instead, wandering out through the same door she came in and easing it shut behind her once Aiden had passed through the threshold as well. She retraced her steps, following back out into the chapel, catching sight of Leah, up on the raised platform, talking something over with a guy in a stained suit, who was gesticulating wildly around his head.

She passed all of it by and stepped out through the front doors, back out into the open air, and took in a slow, almost shuddering breath.

It didn’t help.

The humidity stuck to her throat, the air almost tasted fetid to her senses. It wasn’t the refreshing burst of salt-tinged air that she was used to, that she had defined Brockton with in her childhood. Instead, it was like she had stepped into a salt marsh, or a brackish pond, so thick with the smell of salt and rot that it was almost choking.

She had to center herself, and she knew how to. Had new tools for it. She reached out, past her senses, and to her powers, just like she taught herself to.

Powers, plural. She had four, but she didn’t really know why. At this point, she was willing to chalk it up to chance. After all, if Alexandria could have flight _and_ an impossibly powerful body, despite neither of two being particularly related, why couldn’t she have more than one disconnected power? There were others, too, like Lady Photon, who had more than two powers, and there was nothing special about them. Her kids had gotten basically the same power set.

Hers did feel more detached than she necessarily thought they should, though. The main one, the one swimming the largest and more obvious at her senses, was rodent control. For the first few days of having it after the incident at the shelter, she had assumed it was rat control, but that had been quickly proven wrong when she’d accidentally taken control of somebody’s pet hamster. She’d defaulted to rodent control afterwards, though how far that went, she didn’t really know.

The others were less prominent, but still _there_. She could teleport, and the sensation to it was like taking a step that simply ignored the distance between the place where she began and the place where she arrived at. She hadn’t used it much, hadn’t really had a reason to, ultimately, but the few times she had, it had been somewhat tiring. Too many uses in a row and it left her winded, trying to catch her breath.

She could skew her perception of time, next, and that one was even weirder. It felt, in a way, like a focusing lens, time slowed to a crawl as she narrowed it, but her thoughts remained as fast as they were before. Her body didn’t share that benefit, admittedly, and her head would start to ache, and eyes grow a bit more sensitive to light, if she focused it down too much, but she’d been able to halve the speed of time for more than a little while without too many issues.

Finally, she could... well—build things. She was a Tinker, or at least she thought that was the word for it. She didn’t know the exact specifics of it, wasn’t sure even really where to begin, but it was helping her augment some goggles. It was nothing spectacular, and her stuff seemed to be made from a lot of small moving parts, enough of them that she’d needed to find some tweezers to start working on it.

She discarded her focus on the others, let herself reach out and beyond her senses to her rodent control. Slowly, the world around her came into a sort of secondary focus, for about half a block, she could feel it: motes of information, on the edges of her awareness, spelling out a starry sky’s worth of points on a map. Hundreds of the things sat in her environment.

She could reach out to them, control them, but she could leave it like this too, just sense their position. It worked, for now, and she started walking not long after, pulling her focus away for just long enough to check Aiden was with her, trudging along with a curious, if not exactly perceptive look on his face.

She turned her attention back to the rodents in her environment. Her control was a mixed bag, she could group them together, collect the stars into a swarm, and control that swarm as one entity, or she could grab a star and control it individually. The problem with the latter was that she couldn’t focus on more than a few things at a time, she’d only ever managed to coherently manage four swarms at once, and if one of those swarms happened to be just one rat or mouse, it wasn’t exactly going to be useful.

The way she controlled them was a bit awkward, really. It was a lot like dragging something from one place on a desktop to another, to use a computer as an example. She’d grab hold of those motes and direct them to a spot, and could even give commands. Simple ones, mostly attack, or make noise, or something like that, and they’d do their best to follow it. If she controlled them individually, the commands could be more intricate, but she hadn’t tested that much.

Still, she wasn’t exactly here just for the information. She reached out and grouped the majority of the pests she could sense in the first place into a single group, leaving only a few behind, and told them to _leave_. Pushed them out and away, drawing the largest cluster of them free from where they’d crowded around the dumpsters and kitchen, telling them to run further off into the city, and keep going in that direction at the top speed they could manage.

She’d figured out a few days ago that her commands could and would last when the targets left her range, but it was only ever temporary. She found the same couple of rodents coming back time and time again, rather than endlessly running in the opposite direction of the camp until they starved and died. It might be easier if they did, but then she wasn’t sure if she was up for that sort of task.

Maybe she could get a job in pest control when everything went back to normal and she was inevitably dumped into the foster system.

Grabbing the few rats that she hadn’t told to run away, she drew her focus more directly onto them, grabbed hold of those motes of information, and let the knowledge slide into her. The first blast of information was always the hardest, always grated, it gave her intuitive knowledge on the condition of the rats, but she didn’t really care. She delved deeper, dug further in, until the stream of information turned into what she might almost call a frequency, a channel, viewports.

She saw with the three rats' eyes, heard with their ears, and wondered if she’d ever get used to it. Rat senses were so much harsher, as though everything came with an added amount of feedback, the same sort of feedback you’d get from radios being too close together or a poorly-handled microphone. The light was too bright, the sounds too loud, but it was more than enough for what she needed.

She had the rats creep up and over the wall, in through the window she’d left cracked open, leading into the plumbing area. She had one of the rats shove the other in, when it couldn’t make it on its own, and then had the little thing duck beneath the radiator pressed up against one of the stone walls, saw with its vision that her goggles had gone undetected.

Good. She had to work on them soon, but it was hard to find the time.

Drawing her rat back up, she did the same as she did before, getting one rat to grab the other by the tail and rather painfully yank the thing back out. She pulled back from the information stream, feeling a bit dizzy as the senses fizzled, popped, and then faded entirely, back into just the low murmur of information. With both of the rats out of the building, she pointed them in the same direction as their compatriots, and then turned her attention fully away.

She blinked, took in her surroundings, and found that she could breathe again. That the world wasn’t so clogged up, that she was, if not calm, at least neutral. The world was a bit sharper than it ought to be, but it always was for a few seconds after retreating out of her creature’s senses; bleed-over from how she processed them, by her estimate.

There was another tug on her sleeve, and she glanced down. Aiden was staring up at her. He’d always been small, but the days since Leviathan had made him shed some weight. He was thin, a bit gangly, five years old and looking every minute his age. Messy red hair stuck up in clumps, almost like the down of baby chickens, and his face, while a bit withdrawn and quiet now, would look rather nice with a smile over it.

He was the reason she was still going, still upright, not losing herself to everything. He was her anchor, the person she _had_ to take care of. Since she carried him out of the bunker, he hadn’t let another person but her near him, refused to leave her side, even to sleep. It was separation anxiety, she thought. For her, it worked, she felt almost like she was taking advantage of him, but he was what kept her grounded, made her get up in the morning and stopped her from backsliding. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to take care of him, and that was her job, her duty.

She needed to survive, even if only so he would too.

Taylor reached down, combed her fingers softly through his hair. Despite it, Aiden’s face screwed up in protest, lip jutting a bit as he did his best to glare at her, but didn’t quite get close enough to really sell it.

“You done with the outdoors?” Aiden mumbled, at last, his voice a bit raspy from disuse. It was high, like every kid his age, but trembled if he wasn’t trying to be serious.

She breathed in, turned her head back towards the church, let it out. People worked, milled like worker ants, doing their best to make a bad situation work for them. Work for the ones they cared for.

She retrieved her hand from his hair, let it come to rest at her side.

“Yeah, I think so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! So, I've wanted for a very long time to take the snip of the same name and make it into a fully-fledged fic. Which I am doing now, actually. This will be updated sporadically, though likely more than An Idiot's Guide to the Underworld, as I have a lot more material to work with from it. Below, I'm including a Q&A to clarify what exactly I mean by a 'soft fusion', and what exactly may be different from the original snip this originated from. Do remember that, due to how this has been set up, both the snip and reading the Q&A may be partial spoilers, though the snip is more of a prototype version of the story, and will have several noticeable differences by the time the fic itself actually catches up with it.
> 
> Q: What's a soft fusion, exactly?
> 
> A: I'm coining the term 'soft fusion' to refer to a fusion which is built to resemble another setting, but largely constructed from the existing setting's logic. In this case, Brockton Bay will descend into an equivalent state to Dunwall, and feature technology and characters heavily inspired primarily by the 1st game, including things like walls of light, tallboys, and, of course, the rat plague. These will however be a construct of the setting; the plague is Bonesaw's, and the technology is another character, who I won't be getting into it. As well, Taylor follows a similar logic: she has four powers, meant to mostly emulate or roughly approximate Corvo's power set, but has achieved them through a means which is consistent with Worm's setting. If you've read the snip and the informational post that came with it, you already know what it is. If you want to know, go and look at it.
> 
> Q: Okay, but this first chapter doesn't seem much like the snip I remember reading.
> 
> A: That's because I have to build up to that point. Condemned, in this current construction, is the amalgam of a lot of story ideas I've wanted to explore but never found a way to do so. It is a detailed, intricate machine that needs certain things to happen. Jumping in - in terms of where the fic starts - too late will undercut all that worldbuilding I've spent an ungodly amount of time smoothing out, and I'd rather not have that. I'm really excited to write this, but to make myself clear: arc 1 is for build-up and setting up later plots. I'm sorry if that frustrates you, but I want to do this right, especially considering how enamored I am with what I've created.
> 
> Q: How does this deviate from the snip, otherwise?
> 
> A: Mostly a secret for now. Suffice to say, the snip was, honestly, rather hollow in terms of actual worldbuilding. There were a lot of elements in it that were left simply as-is because at the time I had precisely 0 intention of expanding on the snip, and wanted them to act more as a backdrop. There were loose ends, and more particularly, problems with the characters lacking a lot of motivations to get them to where they are. That has, evidently, changed.
> 
> Q: Is the Outsider going to make an appearance? Even as something like Abbadon?
> 
> A: No. Sorry. This is about as far into a crossover as I am ever going to get. I am much more comfortable into the semi-logical confines of Worm's worldbuilding, and throwing magic into the equation might give me a headache.
> 
> Q: Will canon characters from Dishonored make an appearance, even if they're Worm-based equivalents?
> 
> A: Sort of? Not exact canon characters, but ones who are based off of them, and can be identified by their name.
> 
> Q: What about the organizations? Themes?
> 
> A: I am going to use some of the gang names and their focuses later on in the fic, and there will be a greater focus on conspiracies and, for lack of a better word, revenge, and if it's actually worth it, also later into the fic. Give it time, just for now.


	2. Containment 1.2

Night came without much fanfare, the sky transitioning from a gaunt, sickly sort of overcast to one of more pronounced gloom and darkness. Pitch-coloured clouds hung overhead, rain still yet on the forecast by anyone’s guess, but unwilling to let itself rain down.

A path snaked and curled in front of her, drawing a stripe through waterlogged grass and down to a rounded pit area. A bonfire, about five feet tall, rustled with fire, its embers climbing up into the sky like flurries. About forty, maybe fifty people sat or stood around it, spread out among benches - some of which were, as far as she could tell, literally just logs someone had rolled over - and fold-out chairs. Coolers were interspersed, some open and showing beer and bottled water, while others had packaged hotdogs and other treats.

The fire was the only thing that kept the area illuminated. While she could spot a flashlight or two, only one was on, pointed off towards where the concrete broke away, maybe ten or so feet from where the bonfire itself had been established. It was closer to eight than it was seven, and it showed. Despite it being close to June, the sun was either long set or so veiled by the clouds the difference was meaningless.

At least the heat of the day had left with the sun, turning it from muggy and humid to a bit cooler, the intensity softened by the Atlantic.

Taylor drew her gaze away from the crowd, pointed it down at Aiden next to her. He was staring down there much the same, a focused sort of expression on his face as he gripped at her sleeve with his fingers.

“Are you sure you want to go?” She asked, just for clarity’s sake. He’d been oscillating between excitement and worry all afternoon.

Aiden glanced back at her, his hand tightening a bit more. He gave as serious of a nod as he could. “Want marshmallows,” he explained, a soft, quiet sort of mumble.

Well. What exactly could she say to that?

Taking a step forward, she watched for Aiden to notice that she was beginning their descent before letting her legs start carrying her down the hill. The slope was a touch steep, but not so steep she felt obligated to stare at her shoes just to be sure, and instead turned her gaze elsewhere. Not towards the crowd or the bonfire, but towards the lapping waters, just beyond where the concrete basketball court - or, at least that’s what she thought it was - gave way to about a five-foot drop.

The shelter wasn’t too far behind them, a five-minute walk at most, and still they were on the water’s edge. The new shoreline, defined roughly about where the hills in The Docks rose up into South Docks, was where the church itself was located. It wasn’t a particularly deep shoreline, she could still spot buildings sticking up from the inky black waters, even when it was this dark out, but she knew it wasn’t going to be easy to grow used to the new sight.

When Leviathan had finally been sufficiently driven back and had decided to flee, he had taken The Docks with him. His flight down towards the ocean had come with thousands of pipes bursting, the sewer system collapsing into itself, a small portion of the aquifer the city was built on buckling under the pressure. Ultimately, he had effectively dragged Brockton Bay’s shoreline into the sea, leaving the entirety of The Docks submerged in at least a foot of water, making the slight slope between it and the southern portion of it - or, in other words, the part of The Docks you face when you’re looking directly away from the coastline - more of a cliff than anything else.

To add insult to injury, while the exact specifics of it weren’t clear, he’d apparently also opted to drag the boat graveyard up too, throwing it into the coastline at around where the Lord Street Market used to be, cluttering the entire thing up with rusted-out hulls of ships. Nobody exactly knew what they were going to do with The Docks, but then she was fairly certain that was because the answer to it was probably ‘do nothing’. At best, they’d have to demolish miles of flooded coastal housing and buildings and then fill the thing in with material to artificially raise the area back up.

She shouldn’t need to point out how unlikely that was, especially for a place like Brockton Bay.

Not wanting to dwell overmuch on it, Taylor turned her focus away from the tides down below and towards the bonfire she was rapidly gaining ground on. Already she could spot Piper, standing next to Officer Atkinson—her dad. Piper was about a head shorter than she was, with a thinner build and a more conventionally attractive build. Her hair was pitch black, but not curly like hers, and she had slate-gray eyes with heavy lids. She was wearing what she normally wore to bed: leggings, some furry boots that probably cost more than Taylor had ever seen in her life, and a large sweater thrown over a t-shirt, the Brockton Bay Police Department - or BBPD - logo stretched across its back.

Officer Atkinson shared some traits with his daughter, enough to tell that they were related. He had a similar nose, a similar skin tone - pale and freckled - and a similar mouth shape, but that was where the comparison ended. Officer Atkinson was going bald, and quickly at that, what was left of his light-brown hair cuffed the back of his head like it was holding on to the edge of a cliff. He had a bandage wrapped around part of his neck, up to the left part of his chin, from where he’d apparently taken a fall recently. He was wearing a more subdued version of what he normally wore - his police uniform - with slacks and a t-shirt with a pocket, all the same uniform black.

From what she could remember of his career, Officer Atkinson had been the old police chief. It’d make sense, too, considering he’d been able to get his daughter into Immaculata, but he’d retired a few years back after the police department lost a handful of cops to an E88 drive-by they got caught up in. He’d apparently not fully retired, considering he still had his badge and gun, but he’d been replaced from that position nonetheless.

Finally arriving at the foot of the hill, thankfully no worse for wear, she caught sight of someone rising to meet her. For a moment, her figure was obscured, more of a silhouette from the way the fire framed it. Then, she came into focus, already walking in their direction to greet them.

Cleo was another one of her roommates, and by far the one who was the most liked among them. She was outgoing, kind and hopeful when, between Piper, herself, Edith and Marlon, hope and happiness were generally in short supply. She was, conveniently, also the closest one to her age, though she’d gone to Arcadia rather than Winslow. She was about the only one in the group who could get them all to get along in times of high stress, and that was no easy feat. She knew well enough how difficult she could be when stressed.

From her soft brown skin, dense dark-brown curls she kept tied away behind her head in a bit of a pom, her semi-muscular build and height comparable to Piper, Cleo was every bit the athlete that Taylor wasn’t. She was wearing washed-out jeans, a plaid button-up shirt, brown hiking boots, and one of those heavy-duty watches people wore; the ones you knew wouldn’t break on you in a fall.

She smiled as she approached, though it was mostly focused on Aiden, who had since abandoned her sleeve to tuck, somewhat shyly, behind her leg.

“Hey you two,” she said, her jog easing itself to a stop. “Welcome to the bonfire. I see you’ve brought someone special, too.”

Aiden made a noise into her leg, one of vague discontent.

Cleo just smiled, a mischievous thing, dropping down into a crouch so she could be about eye-level with him, had he not been stubbornly using her as a barrier.

“But, well,” Cleo began, a touch leadingly. “If he isn’t here, he won’t get to have any of the marshmallows I have for him.” Apparently, for emphasis, she drew one arm out from behind her back, a bag of large marshmallows crinkling as she wiggled it back and forth.

All things considered, despite Aiden’s shyness, he was peeking out behind her leg in a record-breaking amount of time, eyeing the marshmallows with great suspicion and interest. “Truth?” He asked.

“ _Is that the_ truth?” Cleo corrected without missing a beat.

Aiden glowered a bit, pitching his bottom lip beneath his top row of teeth. “Are you telling the truth?” he supplied, finally, with great reluctance now that he was no longer permitted to speak like a caveman.

Cleo merely peeled the bag open and fished a marshmallow out, extending it in his direction.

After a furtive glance her way, Aiden crept out from behind her leg, wandered closer, and delicately took the marshmallow. He looked at it with awe, standing in the palm of his hand, as though this was the first time he was being introduced to the idea despite Taylor knowing that he had eaten more than his weight in them before.

“Now, you wanna roast it, right?” Cleo continued, voice leading.

Aiden nodded wordlessly.

She waved him forward, eyes jumping towards Taylor’s for a brief moment to check if this was still okay. It was, and she said as much by nodding. Even if it wasn’t, Aiden wasn’t about to stop, as he was tearing along towards Cleo - and by extension, the somewhat dangerous bonfire - in an excited burst of stumbling limbs. Cleo got to her feet fast, walking with him towards where she’d been sitting before they’d arrived.

Taylor wandered after them, scanning briefly over the crowd. On the opposite side of the bonfire, she spotted another one of her roommates—Edith, who caught her eye and waved lackadaisically. Edith was by far the youngest out of them, but possibly the most seasoned when it came to living in a shelter. Despite being about middle school age - Taylor hadn’t exactly asked the specifics - she’d apparently been homeless for the last three years, bouncing between foster families and the streets without much consistency.

Edith had olive skin, a fairly pronounced nose, and some of the greasiest hair Taylor had the displeasure of becoming acquainted with. She kept it short and slicked back, and when combined with the more rugged qualities of both her appearance and personality - of which both were apparently littered with small scars you don’t notice until she opted to make a point out of it - she bore a somewhat unflattering similarity to what someone might call a greaser.

The only thing Edith really seemed to lack was the accent, not that she wouldn’t show you that she could _totally do one_ to prove a point, of course.

Next to Edith was the last roommate, and the one she liked the least: Marlon. Where Edith was young, Marlon was older, at least eighteen, an adult in her own right, and by far the most violent and cynical out of them. She and Marlon didn’t get along, not even remotely, and she was fairly certain her parents had named her Marlon because they’d wanted a boy, and Marlon had, as a direct consequence, gotten it into her head to make it clear to everyone she met how much she loathed their decision to do so. Not that she said it out loud, but you got the impression she was frequently compensating for something with all of that bravado and violence.

Marlon’s eyes narrowed at her, nearly down to slits, her jaw grit. Edith jabbed her in the ribs, scowling between the two of them, and Taylor decided it was about time for her to not make this into a scene.

She turned away, back towards Aiden.

Cleo had a bit of a posse, for lack of a better term. A gaggle of boys, not entirely dissimilar to how Emma had one in Winslow, though with fairly different dynamics. Cleo and Aiden were packed in among them, with Cleo talking to Aiden as he continued to marvel at the marshmallow in his hand.

The boys themselves—there were five of them, and unlike the others, she didn’t know them well outside of their names. Cameron was from Winslow, she remembered; he had laughed along to the bullying, but never participated. He was lanky, at least six foot, probably well more than that, and pale in the same way Taylor was, as in the one that didn’t tan, it just burned. Next was Tyson, who was quiet and she _assumed_ from Arcadia, considering how well he knew Cleo. He was about as tall as Cleo was, though the blonde hair and pale skin certainly made for a contrast, despite their similarities.

Next was Patrick, who was nihilistic and rarely spoke, but whenever he did it was to make a jab at the expense of their situation. He looked bland, uniform, neither as tall as Cameron or as striking as Tyson. Just white, brown-haired, freckled. The equivalent to how Greg Veder could blend into a crowd, though unlike Greg, Patrick at least knew how to do it. Zack and Aaron were the last two, twins, both with black hair, olive skin, and nearly identical features. Their personalities were quite different, though, where Zack was social, if hideously awkward at times, Aaron just didn’t say much at all.

She wasn’t sure she had even heard him speak before.

Arriving in front of them, she could feel the awkward, third-wheel feeling wash over her again, but opted to ignore it, rather than address it. The boys were looking at her, at Cleo, but not really saying anything. She settled down, easing herself down onto the hard-packed earth, just next to Aiden, curling her legs a bit inward to keep them from getting too close to the fire.

Aiden, without missing much of a beat, clambered up onto her left thigh. Cleo gave her a wry, mutual-suffering sort of look - Aiden could and would cling to anything he became familiar with - but one that was cut short by a branch materializing itself right next to her.

Taylor turned her head, blinked up at Zack, of all people, handing her a whittled-down stick. One for the marshmallow, she was assuming. Mouthing a ‘thanks’, she took the stick from him and eased it down a bit, opening her hand for Aiden to put his marshmallow in.

He hesitated for a long moment, but nevertheless did.

After making sure it was fastened to the sharpened end, she navigated the branch out over the open fire, letting Aiden wrap both of his hands around another part of it while she kept the entire thing steady.

“So,” Zack interrupted at last, breaking the achingly awkward silence. “We got like, twenty new people today.”

Cleo perked up a bit, at that. “Yeah, apparently they were coming up from Downtown. The shelters down there are packed, a couple thousand people apiece. No room for anyone.”

“We also got a few people down from towards the Trainyard,” Zack pointed out from where he was sitting on the log. “Saying Hookwolf’s trying to take control of the area, now that Kaiser’s gone.”

The rest of it, she ignored. Anecdotes about new visitors and the gangs were nice, but she wasn’t entirely invested in it. She turned the marshmallow, murmuring a few words whenever she did for Aiden’s sake, watching as, bit-by-bit, the pristine white of the fluffy marshmallow was reduced to a sooty, dark brown.

She personally didn’t much like roasted marshmallows. They were fine before then, a bit sweet for her tastes, but not _bad_. Aiden, though, apparently couldn’t get enough of them.

“Cooked enough?” She asked, glancing briefly away.

Aiden squinted, then nodded.

Retrieving the stick from the fire, she drew the molten sugar back, towards Aiden, holding the stick in the middle, even despite it being a bit too warm to the touch. “Now, remember, you have to blow on it, okay?”

She got another nod, and finally felt comfortable enough handing it over. Aiden took the stick and blew rather wildly, with theatrical gusts spluttering from his lips.

He could never do anything by halves, she supposed.

“Actually, Taylor, we were thinking—”

Startled, she whipped around, trying not to let it show. Cleo stared at her, voice fading off.

So she’d definitely noticed.

“We were thinking that we would go out tomorrow,” Cleo continued, finally, after apparently making sure she wasn’t about to jump out of her skin again. The pity chafed, and not by small amounts. “Nothing too big, just a bit of scouting, see if we can direct anyone back to the shelter who needs it. Do you want to come with us?”

That made her halt, though. An uncertain feeling swam around in her brain, possibilities. “I’d have to take Aiden with us,” she pointed out.

Cleo leaned back, giving her a nod. “That’s fine. It won’t be too far, and we’re not going near any dangerous areas. Just a walk, you know?”

At that, she glanced back towards Aiden, who was busy devouring the marshmallow in a rather gummy, undignified display of how sticky something like that can really get.

“I was going to go to the library tomorrow to pick up some things for him to read,” she said, turning her head back again.

Cleo just waved that off. “We’ll be heading out around nine, so if you can manage to do it beforehand, it’ll be fine.”

Well. It wasn’t completely out of the question, was it? She turned her focus back to Aiden again, watched as he finally swallowed down the molten sugar he’d been working through. He made a noise of satisfaction, smacking his lips with a look that resembled a particularly triumphant cat.

“Do you wanna go out of the camp tomorrow?” She asked, nudging him upwards with the leg he was sitting on, for emphasis.

Aiden glanced at her, then towards Cleo. “Will there be ‘mallows?”

For whatever reason, that caused most of the boys to start laughing. Amused laughter, not the harmful, targeted sort of funny-at-your-expense laughter.

“He’ll fleece you dry, ‘Lo, better watch out,” Zack teased, leaning towards her with an overly smug look on his face.

Cleo just shot him a dry, dry look, one of deep, if amused, suffering. “You’ve already robbed me for my raisins, at least this little guy’s nice to look at.”

That earned another round of laughter, especially from Zack.

Cleo turned her attention back to Aiden, smiling softly. “No, but it’ll be an _adventure_.”

Aiden got all big-eyed, curious, the sort of look, she was a bit startled to find, that she’d never seen before. He didn’t usually get that involved with other people, didn’t engage as much as he could. It worried her, but evidently, it wasn’t because he was withdrawing into himself, but possibly because nothing else had interested him until this point.

He looked back at her, that curious expression never faltering. “Can I?”

Taylor breathed out, finding a small ripple of warmth in her chest. She’d humour him. If push really did come to shove, she could protect him. “Yeah, we can.”

Cleo smiled, broad and wide, at the both of them. “Great!’

“You know,” Cameron piped up, drawing her attention back towards him. “I’m kinda glad you’re coming with us, you’ve got that whole, like, _icy_ thing going for you. Cold and calculating. We’ll obviously handle stuff, but I bet you could scare them off.”

It, evidently, only occurred to him a few seconds after he’d said it what exactly he just said, and to who. His smile, a bit brittle, fractured and became something more awkward and ambiguous, uncertain.

Cleo glared at him. “You don’t say that to girls,” she said, sounding more than a little cross. “Even to ones you might not like as much. Are we clear?”

Cameron’s eyes wandered away. “Crystal.”

“Dumbass,” Zack snorted.

“I mean, to his credit,” Edith’s voice interrupted, nearly startling her again. She hadn’t seen her come over, but she was only a few feet away this time, hands behind her back. “It’s a good look on you, Taylor. Intense.”

She sincerely had no idea how to respond to that. It wasn’t the first time Edith had brought it up - one of their first interactions was, to quote her, ‘wow, you’re a cold bitch, aren’t you?’ - but as with every other time, she still couldn’t tell if it was a compliment she wanted to receive. It was a compliment, but... compliments could be unwanted, right?

She didn’t really like to think about how much she’d changed, since Leviathan and her Dad. She was fairly sure something was broken in her, personality swings don’t just _work_ like that. Well, maybe they do.

Emma had done almost the exact same thing.

She didn’t think she was too different, but... there were new impulses. Urges. Never show weakness, always know where people are. She wouldn’t call it paranoia, but a sort of defensiveness. It was hard to explain, and harder still to quantify; it didn’t feel like her, not completely, but with every passing day it felt more like her, less alien, less of a random thought pattern she would’ve never given the light of day to, before getting her powers.

But then, getting powers apparently changed people. She just hoped it hadn’t changed her for the worst.

There was a murmur of noise that picked up, growing throughout the crowd. Greetings, from what she could make out, and she turned her head just in time to see who they were all pointed at: Leah.

Leah was climbing down the hill with long strides, a portable radio under one arm and another bag of ambiguous treats under the other. “Sorry I’m late, fellas! I got a _little_ sidetracked. I still got here in time for the eight o’clock announcements, though!”

Because most of the radio towers in Brockton had fallen over or, failing that, didn’t have power, most news and announcements were handled over one of the emergency radio channels. Admittedly there were still a few semi-local stations active, and you could get news to them, but it’d become something of a tradition for everyone to listen to the one that came at eight o’clock, on the dot.

Until they could get the more official channels up and running again, anyway. She wasn’t sure how long it would last, or why they decided eight o’clock was a normal time, but maybe they thought people would be busy at most other times of the day, and it might be good to have some good news before you went to sleep.

Leah sat the radio down on one of the fold-out tables, a short distance away from the bonfire. She cranked it on, adjusting a few knobs, and only got static. At least for a few moments.

“— _ank you for joining us tonight for your local news broadcast. We hope your day has been better than the last, and we hope they continue to improve. As we have done every night, we will first be listing off obituaries of those from our city who stepped up to save us, at the cost of their own lives. The names we are releasing have been ones we were granted permission to reveal by their immediate families. Please hold._ ”

Something sickly, unpleasant, but deeply familiar settled into Taylor at the words. She’d listened to the broadcast before, to the announcements just as many times. It always made her feel the same, an odd mixture of a lot of things. Loss for people she didn’t know, sadness when she thought about the families who had to go on, like her. Something like empathy.

Anger, too.

The crowd had gone silent, murmuring dying out as the only thing left to interrupt the static was the crackle of wood burning.

The static remained for a long while, it always did. Thirty, maybe forty seconds of utter silence as people mustered their wills, or made sure of who exactly they were about to announce.

“ _From the Protectorate. Shawn Thompson, also known as Dauntless. Robin Sawyer, also known as Velocity._ ”

It was a new wound, in a way, but felt much older than that. Old and unhealed, it even somewhat felt like it never might fully heal in the first place. She’d heard the broadcast so many times, in so many different situations and headspaces. It all blurred together.

She shut her eyes.

“ _From the Wards. Carlos Vidal, also known as Aegis. Corben Price, also known as Browbeat. Dean Stansfield, also known as Gallant..._ ”

She breathed in, held her breath. She knew what was coming.

“ _...Sophia Hess, also known as Shadow Stalker..._ ”

She’d found out about that not long after Leviathan came. It had coincided, rather horrifically, with her finding her dad’s corpse. She still wasn’t sure what she felt about it, or how she maybe should be feeling about it. Anger, she knew she felt that about the situation—betrayed, perhaps more so. Someone who tormented her was a _hero_ , was part of their little group. Someone who uprooted her entire life, her future, who tore her down, did everything in her power to hurt her.

But then, what was the recompense? What could she even _do_? Sophia was dead, a hero, someone who fought to keep Leviathan from overtaking the city. She died in defence of everyone, and how exactly can you air your grievances, then? What can you even do to begin addressing that? Speaking ill of the dead was already in bad taste, let alone those who died to save others.

Anyway, what could she do that was more absolute than death? Sophia was dead. She wasn’t here to receive punishment, she was however many feet under the ground in a casket.

Aiden tucked himself further into her, rested his chin on her shoulder as he quietly listened, arms worming around her torso for a more firm hug. Taylor let her eyes open, caught sight of Cleo looking at her, worried and concerned, but knowing better than to ask.

“ _...Manpower. Eric Pelham, also known as Shielder..._ ”

She didn’t want to listen to it anymore. She hated it, but couldn’t hate it.

So she didn’t have to. She reached out to the rodents, let her senses flicker, grow in awareness until they fell into focus and—and... what was that?

Orienting herself in the stars and motes of knowledge was easy. They were dozens of distractions, all at once, simultaneously. If she focused on them for any length of time, she’d start to get some of the information her power fed her when she tried to dive in. Little bits of knowledge, enough to tell her what exactly she was about to start controlling.

Except, what she was getting was... wrong, somehow. Her power could help her differentiate between different rodents, but a lot of the information it fed her - at least when she was leaning into it - wasn’t useful, because she didn’t really understand what most of it meant. Certain hormones, pain receptors, toxicity levels, things that pinged against her awareness, but things she ultimately didn’t understand without a textbook on rodent biology nearby.

There was a group of about six rats, or at least, a rat that her power was telling her was a ‘not-rat’. They were larger than rats were in Brockton, closer to the ones you saw in horror pictures - or, sometimes, jokes - from places like New York. They were clustered near the water’s edge, and they were all wrong. Her power just about throbbed with it, sending back erratic and largely hard-to-define bursts of ‘wrong’.

She dipped her metaphorical fingers in, and still the information wasn't enough to tell her what was wrong with them. They were emaciated, but not starving, hungry yet sated, ready to produce offspring, yet not. They were unilaterally aggressive, the most aggressive rats she’d had the displeasure of running into, she could tell that much. It was like someone had ramped up their hormone levels - _all of them_ \- until it all spilled over into one another. She didn’t know _what_ was wrong with them, just that... something was.

She knew it was a rat, but her power was telling her it also wasn’t. Maybe it was parahuman related? Someone’s rats they’d summoned or created during the Endbringer fight, but then that was... not perfect. She couldn’t really remember anyone like that, and why would you bring a power like that to fight Leviathan?

Maybe they were inbred? Or something degenerative, something related to cannibalism. A lot of the rats from The Docks had been driven into South Docks, crammed together into large swarms, so it might make sense, but...

No. She’d figure it out later, but at this point, her best bet was to just run them off. She leaned on her power, felt it connect and wrap around the rats, and she told them to go as far away as they could. She felt the motes grow further away, the information growing dimmer as it arrived at the edges of her range, and then finally escaped it altogether.

“Taylor?”

Her focus snapped back in, eyes blinking hazily as she recentered herself. It was getting easier to control rats, to sense them, without zoning out, but it was a slow process. She looked towards where the voice was coming from—Cleo, who had a deeply worried look on her face.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, face turning deeper into a frown.

She had to think of something. Something that’d pass muster. “I thought I saw some weird-looking rats,” she said, because it was about as close to the truth as she could manage.

Zack started nodding at that. “Yeah, we keep seeing them too—big fuckers, right?”

Cleo leaned over to cuff him over the head, not holding back much of her strength if the way Zack winced was any indication. “There are children in earshot!” She hissed, deathly stern.

Zack just looked at her, bemused. “But, naw,” he continued, glancing back her way. “Seriously, keep away from them. They’re aggressive and territorial.”

That... maybe it was rabies? She wasn’t really sure what rabies did to rat bodies, or minds, but aggressive, territorial, and disease-related seemed to work. Still, the way her power was telling her it was ‘wrong’ didn’t... entirely track, but then she just didn’t know. Surprisingly, despite the circumstances, she’d only sensed a few diseased rats in her time, and it took a while for her power to process that. New things seemed to take longer for it to decipher, and it would make sense that it might start throwing out alarms and random information if it _was_ something like rabies.

It was about as good of a bet as any, really.

“They ran off, away from the water’s edge,” Taylor said, for lack of a better option. “I doubt we’ll be seeing any more of them tonight.”

Zack nodded, glancing back that way with a wary sort of suspicion. “Nearly got bitten by one, they hiss a _lot_. Tell someone if you see more of ‘em, would you? We’re going to start laying traps, a few people have gotten bit, and it might be a good idea to get a perspective on where exactly they’re comin’ from.”

“But isn’t that just how rats are?” Patrick interrupted, frowning. “Nasty and aggressive?”

“No, that’s _mice_ Patrick, you moron. Mice are the evil bastards. My cousin had a pet rat, named Dumpling. Sweetest little thing this side of the continent. It liked playing hide-and-seek, would squeal happily and stuff.”

“That’s... wonderful, Zack,” Edith interrupted, evidently choosing her words with just the right amount of hesitation to inform everyone just how much she didn’t believe it. “But I’m trying to listen to the radio—so can you just _not_ for a few seconds? Maybe a minute?”

Everyone clammed up at that, and the radio filtered back into Taylor’s perspective.

“ _With related news, Made Man from Philadelphia will be arriving in Brockton Bay tomorrow to aid in reconstruction efforts. This comes after a long period of recruitment after Made Man’s work in east Africa, where he helped aid war-torn countries by reinforcing their borders and gaining protection against local warlords. It is believed that he will be joining the Protectorate, and that Brockton Bay will be his first major project. He will be acting as a main Tinker for the branch until things get back to working order._ ”

“...Wonder why they never talk about Armsmaster,” Edith said, at last.

Taylor couldn’t help herself but agree with that assessment. There was a rather profound absence of _any_ news about Armsmaster, and that was rare. Being one of the original highly popular heroes, he’d always received a lot of attention. It was hard not to give it to him, really. The fact that he wasn’t listed among the dead - even just as ‘Armsmaster’, if his family refused to let his civilian name be announced - or even being mentioned as being wounded was somewhat worrying. They were usually more candid about it, but rather than that, it seemed like everyone had decided to pretend he never existed in the first place.

“ _As well, several Wards from out-of-state are being called in to further reinforce the efforts in the city. Among those include Flechette, a member of the Lancer division of the New York Wards team, and Weld, previously the leader of the Boston Wards. His role will be taken up by Pridwen, in his absence._ ”

“Well, at least _that’s_ something,” Zack said. “I don’t know about Flechetti or whatever, but Weld’s a cool guy. He’s made out of metal, and he’s got a bit of a fan following.”

Despite the peanut gallery, the radio crackled along.

“ _The majority of additional relief efforts are expected to arrive in Brockton Bay in a week, if all continues to go to plan with the current approach. As it stands, they are intending to first address the ongoing blackouts, lack of fresh water, and work to repair the heavily-damaged sewage system. The estimated time of completion, as per an announcement in Washington this evening, is around the end of August, into early September, where it’s expected that Brockton Bay will have recovered enough to become self-sufficient again._ ”

Someone, and Taylor genuinely wasn’t sure who, muttered out a “sure, take your time, it’s not like Leviathan didn’t take special care to sink a chunk of the city or anything.”

In response, the boys lit up in laughter again, especially Patrick, who apparently found that endlessly funny.

Aiden wiggled in closer, his breathing beginning to even out as the conversation and announcements drifted further and further away from the topic of death.

She’d look into the rats tomorrow, if they were going out anyway. See if she could get a better grasp on what was wrong with them, how they felt, make it less of a head rush to sense them in her range. She was already going to the library not just to get Aiden some books, but also herself, books on engineering—mechanical engineering, if she could help it. She’d make a study day out of it, and maybe finally figure something out, whether about her powers or the rats.

She wasn’t picky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a character-focused chapter, if only because they'll be relevant going into the future. Hope you enjoyed!


	3. Containment 1.3

She took the stairs one at a time, keeping herself slow enough that Aiden could follow after her, the soft tap of his shoes against the wooden steps ringing out into the open ceiling of the church’s west wing.

The church itself was a Unitarian church, though you could be forgiven for not knowing that. After all, it wasn’t like it _looked_ like a church; made from slate-gray concrete and built in a similar shape to what she thought a research facility might be like. It was built in the 1800s, as the plaque would politely tell you just outside of the front doors, and was cited as one of the first Unitarian churches in the state of Maine.

There had been a few reasons why the shelter had been designated here, even beyond ‘it was still standing’. Namely, it was a sturdily-built building, meant to last decades without giving in to the elements. Just as relevantly, however, it was barely being used at the time, meaning they weren’t stepping on too many toes when they started moving people in.

Arriving at the top step, Taylor took in the view in front of her. The door to the library was open, giving a direct line of sight to the main desk in the room, behind which an older gentleman sat. He was aged in a way that made the lines on his face deep, like valleys cut through pale earth. He had a head of salt-and-pepper hair, thick and somewhat curly, with bushy eyebrows and a soft, relaxed face.

Stepping in through the door, Aiden close behind, Minister Henry Malcolm - or Henry, for short - turned to greet them. His eyes went to her first, scanning over her face, then jumped to Aiden, where his face softened further. A gentle smile creased into place, pinching wrinkles and giving a new texture to his skin. He rose, his priest robes - and she had no better word for them - ruffling as they did, a bit of a grunt escaping him.

“Back again, I see,” Henry said, bowing his head. “Good morning, Miss Taylor, Mister Aiden.”

Henry was possibly the last official member of the church who was still around. There had been a few others, in the early days just following Leviathan, but she’d seen them departing, likely back to their homes and the shelters associated with them. Why Henry had stuck around, she still wasn’t sure, but she’d always gotten the impression it might be because he didn’t have anything _to_ go back to.

Like a lot of them, she supposed.

Aiden peeked out from behind her leg, hesitating. After a few moments, he rallied himself, glancing furtively up at her before toddling forward, the book Make Way For Ducklings still clutched against his chest as he did. He closed the rest of the distance to the front of the desk, reaching up onto his tiptoes to just barely slip the book up onto the surface of the desk.

“I see you’ve finished it, hm?” Henry murmured, pride swelling through his smile as he looked down towards Aiden. “Very good.”

Aiden nodded in the most serious way he could, lip caught beneath the top row of his teeth. “I like birds,” he said, gentle and soft.

Henry laughed, an old rasping sort of thing that sounded so very much what Taylor thought her own grandfather’s laugh might be, had she ever met either of them. Aiden smiled in turn, fleeting and timid, but nonetheless happy.

“Well, I’m sure we can find you another book about birds,” Henry said, slowly walking around the desk, each step he took careful. He was old, at least in his eighties, and while his hair wouldn’t look out of place on a man in his fifties, his body certainly lived up to his age. “Shall we?”

Aiden spared her another look, faintly worried, like she might at any moment disappear. After a moment, though, he gathered himself, turned back to Henry, and nodded. He reached up as Henry neared, taking hold of his sleeve.

Henry sent a look her way, soft and kind, and she brought the book up she was bringing back as well for him to see. He nodded, and then led Aiden down towards where they kept the children’s books, softly asking about his favourite bird.

Once they were out of sight, Taylor let a breath she didn’t know she was holding out. It hissed out through her teeth, a little tired, a little ashamed about being tired, some awful mix of the two emotions. She glanced further into the library, at the rows of shelves, the size of the room. It was larger than the one she shared with the others, about three or four times as long, but it was still not very large as far as libraries went. It was about two-thirds the size of Winslow’s, and that wasn’t saying very much.

Turning back away from the shelves, she ambled up to the desk herself, placing her book down onto it. It was more of a textbook, older than she was by a few decades; a primer on engineering, moving parts, a book on clock making, more specifically.

She wasn’t entirely sure what her Tinker ‘specialty’ was—and from what she could really remember from the internet, she was supposed to have one. Sometimes, her power was wildly restrictive, giving her next to nothing, yet it seemed to like the goggles she was making, and she hadn’t run into any real troubles in making them, outside of the trouble that comes with getting resources, anyway. Other times, though, it helped her out a lot, gave her insights into the moving parts of a machine to the point where she would feel fairly confident in taking it apart.

As far as she’d been able to tell, that mostly applied to complicated machinery—lots of small parts, interlocking and moving. It was how she’d managed to pick the lock into the plumbing room to hide her goggles in the first place, really.

Looking away, she glanced towards where she’d found her last book in the first place. Her power helped her fill in gaps, realize schematics and ideas in a way, though never anything too concrete. The library, a lot of the time, could feel fairly lacking, as nothing in it had been printed after she was born. There were fewer kids' books, a lot more religious ones, and it was hard to find things for Aiden.

But for her? It was nearly a godsend. Old books on how things _worked_ , back before circuitry really became a thing, were more than prevalent in the shelves. It felt like if she just stuck around here long enough, picked through the rows, she might eventually figure it out. But not everything lined up too well, as while her power helped her with understanding complicated machinery, it... didn’t feel right to say that was her specialty. That didn’t explain how her goggles were going to work - and she, for the record, didn’t understand outside of the abstract - and it didn’t explain that there were _limits_ to that as well.

She had it narrowed down to possibly specializing in optics, or cameras, or something, but that still didn’t feel right. It was missing something, but as far as she knew the only way to get any closer to figuring it out was to keep studying. Keep throwing ideas at the walls, picking over her builds. Doing what she could to at least put a name to what her focus was.

Stepping away from the desk, she slipped into the far row, reaching out to trail her fingers against the books, the pads of her fingers bumping between each.

No, a way to put it might be that it felt more like the complicated machinery was _how_ she built, but didn’t quantify _what_ she built.

Staring at the spines, she watched as books about steam engines transitioned into ones about chemistry, then physics. Older books tended to be towards the back of the rows, but so did the more esoteric of topics. The further you got in, the more niche, bizarre, and aged the books tended to become.

Her finger caught against one of the spines, and she paused, turning towards it. She was nearly at the very back, walls of books boxing her in. She drew her finger away from the spine, read it over. ‘Engines of Knowledge: A Primer on Calculating Machines’. She slipped her fingers over the top, drew it out and into her hand. It was weighty, thicker than most of the books here, heavy enough to probably bludgeon someone with.

Flipping the front cover open, she rested her back against the shelf behind her, eyes slipping across the contents. Names of interest, Charles Babbage, Blaise Pascal, Dorr E. Felt. She only knew a few of them, but considering the content, she could make an educated guess about what the others were known for. This would almost certainly keep her occupied, especially with that itch that she’d come to associate with her ability to build things drawing to the surface, urging her to dig deeper into the book, to look for ideas.

She shut it, ignoring the frustrated, restless sensation that came with it. Slipping the book back beneath her arm, she walked back out through the rows of bookshelves and arrived at the desk, still abandoned. Setting the heavy book down on it, she turned around to wait, leaning against the edge of the surface, letting her eyes shut.

It took maybe a minute for the sound of footsteps to reemerge, Aiden’s shuffling, tappy gait drawing her eyes back open as he emerged with Henry in tow, hugging a new book to his chest. ‘Owl Moon’ was written across it, beneath which a pleasant watercolour painting had been transposed onto the hardcover surface. 

Henry’s gaze went from her to the heavy book on the desk, an eyebrow pulling up inquisitively. “Never thought I’d see that old thing get taken out,” he said, wandering around to the desk and slipping back into his seat with a bit of a relieved sigh.

“Just interested in it,” Taylor said, and it was technically the truth. She was more interested in what her power might make out of it, if it would drive her any closer to the answers she wanted, but he didn’t need to know that.

Aiden arrived at her side, holding his book up for her to take.

She did, placing it next to where she had left her own.

Henry retrieved a large, worn book from behind him, opening it open to show yellowish papers within, detailed with margins, some filled in with new ink, and some filled in with significantly older ink that had long faded. “Either way,” he conceded, evidently not about to question her motives. “Let’s get these two books signed out.”

* * *

“Promise you’ll read when we get back?” Aiden asked, for the third time.

She should’ve known he would want to dig into his book the first second he could, especially if it was about birds. It reminded her a bit of herself, sitting on the edge of her seat as her parents drove her back home, scouring over the back of the movie they’d just rented for the night, trying to imagine what it might be like.

Glancing down his way, Taylor smiled. He was wearing his red backpack - though they’d left their books back in their room - and had a determined furrow to his brow. A very serious little guy. “Yeah, I’ll read it when we get back,” she promised, again, like she always did. His face flickered a bit at that, a smile edging at the corners of his mouth.

Turning back towards the path ahead, Taylor kept her pace steady, watching as one of several gates into the shelter came into view. She could already spot Cleo, Piper and some of the boys near it. Particularly, Zack and Patrick had bats, and were noisily fencing with them. She didn’t think it was bad enough out there that they’d need weapons to protect themselves, but then the fact that they were fooling around maybe meant it wasn’t.

Should she have brought Aiden? It wasn’t like she could leave the camp _without_ him, but...

Cleo spotted her before she could let that thought continue much further, face lighting up as she pulled away from the gaggle of boys. She jogged closer, raising her hand in a bit of a wave, which Taylor found herself returning. Piper hung back, just watching the interaction, and some of the boys turned, spotting her as well.

“Hey, Taylor! Aiden!” Cleo closed to the rest of the distance, a bit of a huff to her breath as she drew to a stop just a few paces away from them, gravel crunching beneath the treads of her shoes.

Taylor directed her eyes to the bats, which were now being handled much more professionally, or at least not as toys to try to batter each other with. “Is it that dangerous out there?” She asked, just to get the question out of the way.

Cleo turned following her look, glancing back towards the two boys who were now trying to hide the bats sheepishly behind their backs. “What? Oh, no. Those are mainly for show. They just want to carry them around, it makes them feel tough. You know how boys can be.”

“I heard that!” Zack hollered back towards them, not sounding terribly upset about the comparison.

Cleo rolled her eyes, turning her head back towards the two of them. “C’mon, I’ll tell you more about where we’re heading.” With that, she was off, wandering forward with a casual stride of her legs, leaving Taylor to follow.

Aiden took hold of her sleeve with his fingers, a slight tug. She reached down more directly, taking his hand in her own, his digits wrapping tightly around her index and middle fingers.

The gate leading out to the camp was chainlink, set amid the fence that portioned off the camp from the outside world. It sat on a gravel path, leading up and out, back onto the actual road that, as she approached, she could already see. The gate itself had been left open, kept secure by a rock.

People were milling around, smoking and talking. She spotted Officer Atkinson near the front of the fence, watching Piper carefully, but saying nothing, as well as a few others. A number of the people there looked like they were about to travel, and it made sense. Apparently, without the internet, there was now a market for people who could get messages back and forth between the different shelters.

“So, you guys ready to go?” Zack’s voice interrupted, drawing her attention back in. Cleo had led them right up to the group, which consisted of Cleo herself, Piper, Zack, Patrick and Aaron. They were all dressed in a variety of clothes, though the fact that nobody else was wearing a jacket made the fact that she was wearing Dad’s a bit awkward. Made her feel out of place, almost, not that she gave that line of thought too much attention.

“Just give me a sec,” Cleo protested, arriving just next to the fence to grab at a black hiking bag, presumably her own. Once she had it fastened to her back, she turned towards them, nodding. “Alright, so. We’ll be heading out through the main gate, up onto the street, and heading towards where it would normally drop into The Docks. We’ll be taking the opposite direction when we get to that hill, just to see if anyone further into the suburbs is around. After that, we’ll turn back around, because we can’t get too far up there. Hookwolf’s been spotted a few times up closer to The Trainyard, and nobody wants to get involved with that.”

The faces of the others grew a bit serious, and Taylor found herself reconsidering the decision to bring Aiden along. She knew, rationally, that The Trainyards were over an hour’s walk - or more, if the roads were as bad as she expected them to be - from where they currently were, and it wasn’t like they were going looking for people like Hookwolf, but still. He was a career villain, he’d been condemned to the Birdcage more than once, and yet nothing had managed to quite stick yet.

Still, she had to be rational about this. Emotions were well and good, but if Aiden wanted to go out, she’d do her best to make that work. Tightening her grip on Aiden’s hand, she nodded. “Alright.”

Cleo smiled brightly, motioning them all forward as she stepped from the grass to the gravel road, rocks clattering beneath the weight of her step. The others followed, with Taylor letting herself take up the back of the group.

As they passed through the gate, Officer Atkinson reached over to pat Piper on the shoulder, firm. She smiled at him, a bit nervous, but one larger than Taylor had ever seen on her before, before the distance between the two of them made Atkinson let go.

The gravel path leading out of the camp was a slight incline, with grass walling each side of it in. There was enough room on the gravel path to fit two cars side-by-side, but not much more. Even so, that gave the group enough room to fan out into a more disconnected mass. Nobody said much as they approached the road, not even Zack, who had balanced the heft of his bat on his shoulder.

As they climbed over the remainder of the incline, onto the asphalt surface, Taylor was reminded that she hadn’t left the shelter’s perimeter since she first arrived. The road that stretched out in front of her was cracked, with foot-wide crevices between larger chunks of concrete. Houses sat on each side of the road, none with lights, most of them with windows that had broken under the storm that had accompanied Leviathan.

All of the buildings were still standing, yes, but none of them were occupied anymore. She remembered that this part of the city, where the lines between Downtown, The Docks, and Docks South blurred, had been told to go to The Docks shelter, as it was the closest available. When Leviathan had sunk The Docks, he had killed everyone in those shelters. Thousands dead, with nearly as many houses now left empty.

Cleo was the one to start walking forward, after everyone stopped. She glanced over her shoulder, shooting the entire group a look, before picking up her pace, casually stepping over the cracks that got in her way. Zack and Aaron picked up behind her, keeping fairly close, while Patrick hung a bit further back, his eyes still trained on the empty houses with their water-clogged yards and abandoned vehicles.

A harsh tug on her hand drew her focus back down, back to where Aiden had stumbled over the first foot-wide crack, nearly toppling without her to pull him back up. She glanced towards the group, already a growing distance between herself and the rest of them. “Guys?”

They turned, staring at her.

“One second, okay?” Turning back towards Aiden, she helped him get his footing back - Aiden himself saying nothing, almost sulking because he nearly tripped - and dropped down into a crouch just next to him, folding her arms near her back. “Up you get.”

Wordlessly, Aiden clambered onto her back, and she tucked her arms around his legs, pushing herself back into a stand. The extra weight left her somewhat top-heavy, making her totter for a few seconds, but once she got her footing, she was walking and closing the distance between herself and the rest of the group.

She felt Aiden’s chin come to rest on her shoulder, a mumbling sigh of discontent escaping him.

“It’s like a ghost town,” Zack finally interjected, now that they were all mostly there. He was looking off towards where, without the houses in the way, he’d probably be able to see the cliff-like drops into The Docks. “Eerie.”

“Isn’t it kinda one of those already?” Patrick pointed out. “I mean, they’re all—”

Cleo shot him a look, and he didn’t complete that sentence, mouth pinching into a fine line.

The conversation died the sort of death you’d expect it to at that, and they passed further down the road, towards where she could see the intersection Cleo was talking about. The road gave way on the right side, dipping down into a hill, whereas it rose up on the left, another branching path into the suburbs that was just out of sight, blocked by the rows of empty houses.

“Pigeon,” Aiden announced, abruptly, right next to her ear. She just barely managed not to flinch.

She angled her head, caught sight of his arm pointing up. True to his word, there was a single pigeon perched on a slightly crooked power pole, staring down at them, its feathers fluffed.

“That bird looks like it’ll try to crap on me,” Zack said.

Cleo snorted. “Way to tempt fate.”

“Did you know doves are pigeons?” Aiden babbled, undeterred by the threat of fecal bombardment. “Leah told me.”

Zack glanced back at him, looking genuinely startled. “No way?”

“Way!” Aiden corrected, rather loudly at that. Loud enough that it spooked the pigeon, which took off from its perch and vanished back around the houses.

They watched the bird depart in relative silence, Cleo still keeping the pace relaxed and slow as they started to approach the intersection at the far end of the street. Without the houses in the way to block her vision, it gave a near-perfect view right down into The Docks below. Without the night to obscure the details, it looked especially horrible. True to her expectations, it was like the land just _dropped_ after a point, a sheer cliff that ranged between five and ten feet depending on where it started, cutting through the rock to show the layers. Saltwater washed up against the ruins, foaming over concrete, leaving about five or six feet of dry ground down there before you’d start having to wade through water.

If the houses up here were in disrepair, the ones down there were nearly totalled. Most of them were barely standing, others had chunks of other buildings shoved into them. The suburb had, a time ago, reached down into the better parts of The Docks, the wealthier end, and would’ve continued on for another couple of streets, at least, before connecting back up with the main street that ran the length of the waterfront.

Now she could see maybe the top half of those buildings, and most of them not at all. Debris came in and out of view as the tides washed against it. The only things that sat above the surface were the bits of high rise she could spot further out on the horizon, and the occasional tree, though those were in short supply.

She really didn’t know how they were going to fix any of that. Or even clean it up. It seemed impossible, The Docks weren’t a small part of Brockton, and they were just... gone. Entirely. It was as if Leviathan had seen one of the few things - outside of the capes, anyway - which drew people to the city in the first place and had decided to take that from them, too. She might’ve thought The Docks were too expensive for her tastes, but it didn’t mean she necessarily wanted it gone.

Turning away, she followed the rest of the group as they took the turn opposite to the drop, leading back into more maze-like streets of empty houses and yards. At least this time, in a change of pace, at the far end of the road was a 7-11, with what looked like a power pole that had collapsed onto it. The transformer had come unattached from the pole, leaving it on the flat surface of the roof.

Her power itched at her as she walked. There’d probably be copper in that, right? She did need it, but she wasn’t sure about the logistics of getting access to it without giving away that she had powers. Not to mention it was probably very illegal to dismantle a transformer for parts.

“Did you guys ever think this would happen to you?” Patrick asked, quiet in a way that he normally wasn’t.

Taylor... wasn’t really sure. She remembered, abstractly, when she’d first really understood what an Endbringer was, as a kid. It was about the time when the Simurgh had first appeared, over Switzerland, and the accompanying fallout that had radiated out from that incident. She’d asked her mother what was going on, why everyone was so tense, and she’d had to be sat down and have it explained to her that there was another one. That there was a new Endbringer.

She’d understood, even before that, that Endbringers were a _thing_ , but they had been so... distant for her. Villains, yes, but not ones she had to think about. Villains who the heroes fought back. The Simurgh had been her first real moment of awareness, of what that could mean for her, for her life. The political killings, assassinations, and nuclear scares that had followed the Simurgh’s first arrival had only cemented that realization, from then on.

“Sometimes I did,” Aaron cut in, his voice a bit raspy, possibly from disuse. “I just... didn’t think we’d be important enough.”

Right. That was one of the things about places like Brockton Bay. You always felt safer than you should, because _why would they attack us?_ What would they achieve by capsizing a town of three-hundred-thousand? Nothing, really, because it’d taken experiencing an event like that to realize Leviathan probably didn’t really care about what he was doing, just that he _was_ doing it.

They grew closer to the 7-11, mostly in silence, though with a smattering of conversation that Taylor didn’t really want to take part in.

“I think someone might’ve been here,” Cleo said, cutting through the quiet. She gestured, off towards the 7-11, where a metal garbage can had its interior walls covered in coal-black soot of some kind. There were wrappers on the ground around it too, though it was hard to tell if that was just another piece of garbage floating like a tumbleweed through the city, or if it was related to the bin at all.

Scanning off towards where the road turned away from the 7-11, she spotted it: a car. Not to say that cars were exactly in short supply, but ones on the road almost definitely were. “That might be them down there.”

Heads turned in the way she was looking, catching sight of the car up ahead. She still couldn’t see anyone near it, but then—she had powers for a reason. Reaching out to her senses, she reached for the rats and nearly cringed as most of them felt _wrong_. Again, that wrongness stuck to them, and there were more of the wrong rats than there were normal ones. Was rabies that virulent? It felt like it shouldn’t be.

She grabbed the healthy ones, pulling a small cluster of them up from where they’d been rummaging through a house. She pressed into their senses, and got her first glimpse of the car up close. She saw figures, three of them, tucked away in the car, though she couldn’t make out any features because the rat’s sight was a bit too harsh, the light that reflected against the glass obscuring it.

But, still, people _were_ there.

“Think we should approach?” Cleo asked, looking back towards Zack, Patrick, and somewhat weirdly, her.

As she focused on Cleo, she started grabbing more healthy rats, just to be safe, drawing them up from the environment into a larger cluster. If that was some sort of ambush, she’d get everyone out of it, even if it meant giving up her identity.

“I can’t see why not?” Zack offered, stepping forward.

The rest of the group seemed to agree with that, and Taylor followed after them as she continued to build up a swarm, keeping them out of sight for the time being.

When they got about halfway to the car at the far other end of the street, the doors to it popped open, and she got her first look at the actual people inside. There were three teenagers which stumbled out of the old honda, with its chipped red paint. A girl with brown hair who felt and looked familiar, in a similar sort of way to how Cameron had felt before she’d remembered where she met him, and two guys who were significantly less familiar. One of the guys in particular had a crowbar, and was clutching it with a white-knuckled grip, staring at them.

Zack, taking the lead this time around, raised his hands. “Hey! We don’t mean any trouble, alright?”

“We’re just out here looking for survivors. We’re from the Unitarian shelter!” Cleo followed up, jogging forward and waving her hands.

The two guys looked between the lot of them, and while they didn’t quite relax, the guy with the crowbar at least let it drop. The girl, for whatever reason, was staring dead ahead at her, refusing to move her eyes away. Taylor ignored her, not willing to spend the energy on it right now.

They arrived a few meters away from the car itself and slowed to a stop. Cleo stepped forward, even past Zack, waving her hand at them with a smile. “I’m Cleo, sorry about the scare, we’re just coming around to tell people about our shelter, just so they can feel like they have options.”

“I—” the girl started, hesitating. “Do you know if Amanda Munroe is there?”

Cleo looked towards the boys, who shrugged, shook their heads, and otherwise didn’t seem to know much. Turning back, she gave the girl an apologetic look. “You’d have to ask someone there.”

“Can we?” The girl asked, hesitantly, looking towards the two other boys. They might be older than her, but she was still Taylor’s age, by her estimate.

“Charlotte,” one of the boys said, tiredly. “We—” he turned back again, looking at them. “We’re from the Brook Street synagogue. We had to leave because we were getting hassled by Hookwolf’s crew, and Amanda ran off before we could find her. We’ve been looking for her, but we’re not sure what direction she went.”

Piper stepped forward at that, a bit of her normal nervousness gone. “You might have better luck if you have a base to work from,” she offered. “My dad, he’s the officer working for the shelter. He could help you guys look for her, if you need, but I feel like living out of a car isn’t going to do you much good. We’re not far from here.”

That was... possibly the most she’d ever heard Piper say at once. There was something in how she held herself, how she was acting, that made her think that maybe this was who Piper was before Leviathan, before all that trauma. The image of an Immaculata student now made a lot more sense, fit more neatly together.

The boys glanced among themselves again, before looking back at Charlotte.

“Look,” Cleo cut in, stepping forward again. “There’s no pressure. We’re not going to push you, we’re here to point you to a safe place for the time being. It’s okay to be wary, stuff is in flux, and I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through has been too easy on you.”

That finally seemed to get the group to calm down, their postures relaxing, dropping the pretense of wariness for something looser. “We’ll think about it,” one of the boys offered. “Take a vote or something, and... well, we’ll come around if we think it’s worth it, okay?”

“That’s cool,” Zack agreed.

“We should probably turn back here, anyway,” Cleo pointed out, gesturing up ahead to where the streets tangled into more maze-like roads. “This is about as far as we can safely go.”

Realizing, briefly, that she had still been drawing in rats, Taylor grabbed at her senses again, reaching out to the rather ludicrous swarm she had made for herself. She hadn’t even really been thinking about it, which startled her. There were nearly twice as many there as there had been when her attention had been pulled away. She directed most of them back out into the world around her, though kept a smaller cluster with her. It wouldn’t hurt to get some experience using them, in any event. 

As Taylor turned, she noticed Charlotte again, felt her stare more openly. Her mouth was half-gaped, like she wanted to say something, but no words were coming. She still couldn’t remember where she’d originally seen the girl, but then it wasn’t exactly hard to imagine it must’ve been at Winslow. Not exactly the biggest leap to make, in all honesty. The fact that she couldn’t remember her whatsoever was a point in her favour, meaning she probably hadn’t taken part in or enjoyed the bullying she experienced.

But she still hadn’t done anything. Nobody had.

She shut the stare out, grunting as Aiden wobbled on her back, clutching his arms around her neck just a little tighter. Her legs ached, not used to this much work. Not that Aiden was particularly heavy, if anything he was a bit underweight, and despite having exercised ever since the incident back in November, it wasn’t like her body was exactly in peak condition.

Enough to carry a five-year-old around without toppling, though. That much she could do.

As a group, they headed back down the same street they came in from, Cleo keeping up the head with Zack at her side. Aaron had fallen back to speak with Patrick, a worried look creasing over his face as they spoke back and forth in furtive whispers.

* * *

Cleo’s hand snapped out in front of them, stopping everyone.

Taylor felt her shoes catch against the muddy grass of a backyard they’d taken as a shortcut. Because of the way the suburbs had been constructed, a lot of the roads were parallel to one another, if with houses between them. Cleo had recommended they not go walking through the winding streets and just cut straight through the houses.

Evidently, though, something had gone wrong.

She could hear it. The city was normally so quiet without cars on the streets, without all that many people around. The sound of an engine cut through that silence like butter, rumbling loudly. She could hear something else behind it, too, murmurs—people talking.

Cleo brought her hand back up to her lips, the sign for quiet, before creeping forward.

Aiden on her back went still, clutching tighter. Taylor moved ahead, passing by Aaron, getting close to the house and the small path that would lead right out in front of the gravel path leading into the church. Through the gap, she saw it: a pick-up truck, mud-stained, with three guys in it. One was leaning out the driver side window, while the other two were perched in the trunk of the truck, leaning over the roof to stare down at Officer Atkinson and Leah, who were now in front of a very much closed gate.

Officer Atkison, tellingly, had his hand close to his gun.

Pulling on her small swarm of rats, she split one off and drew it up through the grass next to them, keeping it quiet before sending it into the brush and out next to the street.

Getting used to the rat’s senses was coming easier with each use, and so this time she didn’t feel so disconnected as she slipped into them, feeling the feed of information widen into a signal that her brain could process. She saw, with the eyes of her rat, that one of the guys had his shirt off, with a swastika tattooed over his heart. A common white power tattoo, she’d seen more than a few in her life before now.

The gangs in Brockton had already been in a state of disrepair by the time Leviathan had hit. The ABB were systematically dismantled after their Tinker went completely insane and tried to destroy the city after Armsmaster took down Lung. The end result of that had been the villains banding together to take them out after the Tinker had managed to free Lung from captivity, and now both of them were in the Birdcage.

The E88 had gotten outed about a week before Leviathan hit, and apparently lost more than a few to Leviathan. Kaiser specifically had been killed, if rumours were to be believed, leaving the entire organization in shambles.

The Undersiders were new, but they’d moved in to fill the power vacuum left over by the ABB. They didn’t really hold territory, but their capacity to call on out-of-town capes who were extremely powerful had kept them in the game since their original arrival. She wasn’t sure what happened to them due to Leviathan, but they seemed to be keeping a low profile nowadays.

The Merchants were in a similar sort of boat, if not necessarily powerful. Drug peddlers who worked out of The Trainyard, they’d been involved in the gang conflicts just before Leviathan, but hadn’t taken many losses, not as far as she could tell. They hadn’t done much either, to be fair, and they’d gone to ground not long after Leviathan too, which didn’t seem like their normal behaviour. Usually, they were less subtle than that.

“We’re not interested in your racket, you should know that,” Leah said, her voice a touch tinny, uncomfortable with the rat’s ears, picking up on high notes she hadn’t noticed were there.

“We’re just looking for some _help_ ,” swastika-heart said, grinning all the while as he leaned over. “We’re refugees, just like you guys. We need your help! So be a good samaritan, yeah?”

“The type of help you need is not the type we have on offer,” Officer Atkison rebuked, flat. “You should get going, you’re not getting any supplies out of us.”

“But communities are important for _safety_ ,” the guy driving the truck said, almost a song in his voice. “If you don’t get one, it’s mighty possible you might not be so _safe_ anymore.”

To that, Officer Atkinson drew his gun from its holster. He wasn’t pointing it at them, but the threat was clear.

So too, she supposed, was the threat the neo-nazis were making.

“Be on your way, boys,” Officer Atkinson said, voice edging dangerously low.

Finally, that seemed to make them a bit warier. The guys in the back of the truck slipped back down into it, no longer letting themselves be in the line of sight of Officer Atkinson, and the one driving it slipped back into the truck.

“We warned you!” The guy in the truck hollered, but nonetheless, he still pitched the truck into reverse. The vehicle swung around, spitting gravel towards Leah and Officer Atkinson, before screaming back up the gravel path and lurching up onto the road, whipping past them.

“Dad!”

Taylor snapped her head back around, in tandem with her rat, just in time to see Officer Atkinson stumble. For a moment, she thought they’d hit him somehow, but as the gate was flung open and people spilled out from inside, there was no sign he had been. Instead, the man was wheezing a bit, looking tired, as he started to collapse.

Piper had already torn ahead of them, sprinting, and Cleo wasn’t far behind her. The boys picked up their pace, leaving Taylor to jog forward after them as they all spilled out from around the corner of the house, onto the street, and then down onto the gravel path. Piper was already at her dad’s side by the time she was making her way from street to gravel.

Others had caught him before he could fall, keeping him upright. Leah was next to them, looking pensive and more than a little worried.

Dismissing her rat, she let her senses slowly fade back to where they normally were, descending the slight incline of the gravel path. The boys and Cleo were already there, standing a few feet away from Officer Atkinson as Piper, at his side, tried to help him to his feet.

“Haven’t been feeling too well, Pipes,” Officer Atkinson said, close enough to overhear. “Bit of a cough, lightheaded, nothing I thought I couldn’t work through.”

They got him to his feet, only for his knees to buckle unceremoniously, dropping him back down.

“But apparently not.”

A nurse from the crowd that had thrown the gate open approached, only indicated by the red cross pin she had attached to her shirt. She dropped down next to Officer Atkinson, shaking her head at the people who were trying to get him back up again. She reached forward, brushing the back of her hand over his forehead, then pressing her fingers into his pulse-point.

“We need to bring him to the infirmary, he’s running a fever and his heartbeat is irregularly fast,” the nurse explained, climbing back to her feet. She turned to Leah, then, looking somewhat pensive. “I need confirmation for some Tylenol, something to help it for now, until we can figure out what’s wrong.”

The members of the crowd who had rushed forward were reorienting Officer Atkinson now, getting him upright, but still sitting, letting him rest his back against the fence for the time being.

Leah turned, looking a bit overwhelmed, before her eyes met Taylor’s. She jogged up, and Taylor slowed down, just in time for Leah to grab a set of dog tags from around her neck. “I need you to do something for me,” she said, quickly, glancing at Aiden, who was still tightly wrapped around her back. “You’ll need your hands, though.”

Aiden shuffled against her back, kicking a little to indicate he could be put down. She dropped into a crouch, letting him slip off, and before she could even get used to not having the extra weight to carry around, the dog tags were being forced into her hand, the metal chain brushing against her skin.

“I need you to go to the storeroom, show them this, and ask for some Tylenol. Okay? I need to handle this.”

She looked at the dog tags, at Leah’s name printed into them, then back up at the woman in question. Aiden tugged at her sleeve until she offered up her free hand, which he took without another word. “Alright.”

The storeroom, she knew, was originally a hut or a groundskeeper’s shed at one point. She pulled away from the group, passing in through the front gate, and cutting immediately off to the right, onto the soft grass and towards where it sat, not too far away from the church itself. It wasn’t that large, it really did embody the word ‘shed’, but it was possibly one of the most guarded parts of the entire camp.

Arriving at the front door, she banged her knuckles twice against the metal door.

“Come in!” A voice hollered from inside.

She dragged the door open, stepping into the small, cramped shed. It was full of supplies, boxes worth, with shelves of food and water. There were two people inside, one of which was sitting on the surface of the desk, while the other was further inside, only barely visible from where half his body stuck out from around a shelf full of MREs.

They were both also very visibly armed. All to stop people from potentially stealing anything.

She raised up the dog tags, gripping the chain rather than the tags themselves. “Leah sent me in to get some Tylenol. Officer Atkinson seems to have come down with something, and collapsed after an altercation.”

The girl on the table hopped down, wandering over to one of the shelves. It took another few seconds, but she returned with a small plastic ziplock bag, with about four or five pills inside of it. She handed it over, Taylor gripping it awkwardly with her hand already mostly taken up by the dog tag’s chain.

Heading back out of the storeroom, she paced across the grass as quickly as Aiden would let her, making her way back over to where Leah was. The crowd had grown around Officer Atkinson, and someone had brought up a chair for him to sit in. Now that she was closer, she could see the sweat on his brow, the pale of his skin, the way the area around the bandage on his neck looked inflamed and red.

Leah turned at the sound of her footsteps, and Taylor wordlessly handed the bag and dog tags back. The dog tags were quick to return to Leah’s neck, while the bag was given to the nurse, who pulled a few of the Tylenol out and brought what looked like a canteen up from where it had been fastened to her belt, making her way towards Officer Atkinson.

“Is he going to be okay?” Taylor found herself asking, not entirely sure.

Leah looked back at her and frowned. “I... don’t really know. Part of the problem is that traumatic incidents like this tend to weaken your immune system. Couple that with poor water quality and food, and it’s a recipe for parasites and diseases. I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t handle, but... all we can really do is wait. I’ll call for Dr. Wright if he doesn’t get better soon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The descent begins! I know that not a whole lot has happened, but I'm keeping to my motivations here and saying I want this build up of dread and disquiet for this arc. It's not perfect for serialized style of writing, I'll be the first to admit that, and this would flow much easier if it was all published at once, but I feel like this is necessary and important to setting the tone and focus of future chapters.
> 
> Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed!


	4. Containment 1.4

She was back at the bunker, as stuck as she always was in those memories. An endless crush of people stretched on for what looked like miles, impossibly vast, thousands, millions of people, all packed together so tight they started to blur into one another.

She was begging people to help, to get her free. It didn’t hurt, but she was trapped, and there were people there, surely they’d listen.

But they didn’t. They never did. So her pleas became screams, begging.

Nobody cared.

Nobody responded.

She was trapped, and they did not—

Something hard lodged itself into her abdomen, and her eyes slammed open, a noise of pain escaping her. The screaming, what had once been hers, was now Aiden’s, ringing out into the darkness of the room. He was wailing, thrashing back and forth in the bed they shared, trying to grab at something, saying something that she couldn’t parse. Her focus spiked, and she was as awake as she’d ever been in her life.

As quick as she could manage, she reached out, took hold of him even as his kicks turned back towards her, pelting her in the stomach with solid blows, fighting against her, each impact a spasm of pain. She held onto him through it regardless, murmuring something, her brain running on autopilot as she kept repeating it. Slowly, the flurry of blows started to die off, enough that she could pull him in, up against her front, his face pressing into her shirt as wailing was replaced with low, heaving sobs, shuddering through his tiny body. She felt his tears leak through her shirt, dampen the surface of her skin.

Her own breathing was short, choppy, from a mixture of the adrenaline in her system and the twinge of pain that came with each inhale or exhale. The raw intensity of the world around her eased off, felt less like the air was on fire and vibrating, and finally let her really process what she was seeing. The room was still dark, gloomy for all but the light peeking out from beneath the door, but she could still make out her roommates.

All of them were awake.

It was hard to tell without her glasses - hereditary nearsightedness left most things as indistinct blurs without them - but Cleo looked to have gotten up, and was angled roughly to look in her direction. Marlon was sitting up in bed, not saying anything, and also not looking in her direction, Piper was on her feet, almost halfway into the room itself, but was now slowly walking back towards her bed, as though she'd leapt out of it when Aiden had started screaming. Edith, almost directly across from her, was staring right at her, with one leg out of the bed, and as far as she could tell, with her blankets twisted up in both of her hands.

“Shut the kid _up_ ,” Edith hissed, loud enough that it cut through Aiden’s quiet sniffles. “Some of us are trying to _sleep_.”

Aiden, apparently awake enough to parse some of that, curled in deeper, his knees digging into her stomach, where there would certainly be bruises the next day.

Taylor felt her jaw grit, felt every part of her begin to tense. Anger washed away the fatigue and sleepiness she felt, replacing it with indignation. Hate. She couldn’t climb up to a sit, but she found herself trying to do so anyway, even against the twinge in her stomach.

“This is the third time this _week_ ,” Edith continued, her voice raising in pitch from a hiss to nearly a yell. “Taylor, if he’s going to keep screaming like this, he can sleep out in the _hallway_ —”

“Edith,” Marlon, of all people, cut through, her voice flat and sharp. “Enough.”

Edith clammed up, twisting her hands in her bedsheets. She rose fully, kicking half of her sheet down onto the floor. “Fuck all of you,” she snarled out, clambering to her feet and grabbing at something on the ground that she couldn’t make out in the gloom, something that turned out to be sweatpants as she hiked them up her frame. She stormed towards the door, wrenching it open and just about blinding Taylor.

By the time she could blink the spots out of her eyes, Cleo was on her feet and getting dressed too, and Edith was nowhere to be found, not even in the painfully bright hallway.

“I’ll go talk to her,” Cleo said, softly. “Please don’t be angry at her, she’s... had a rough time.”

Then she was gone, too, stepping out through the door Edith had left open, pausing only to shut it behind her, the room cast back into gloom.

In her arms, Aiden’s sobs weakened to heavy breathing, his fists loosening from where they’d gripped her shirt. Slowly, his breathing evened out, and whatever nightmare seemed to have taken him - and if she had a guess, that incident with Officer Atkinson had probably been what set him off - released him, and his sleep returned.

Gradually, she disentangled herself from him, easing her pillow into his grip, which he wormed his arms around wordlessly, curling into it with as much force as he could muster. Slipping out of the bed, still ignoring the pain in her stomach, she reached forward, pushing the blankets up around Aiden’s form, tightening them and tucking him in.

Feet cold on the floor, she toppled a bit, reaching out to brace herself against the wall with one hand while the other came up to wipe at the gunk around her eyes.

She felt disgusting. And fully awake.

Great.

Sighing, she reached blindly for about where she remembered her bedside table being, her palm buffing against the surface as she dragged her fingers around its surface, her knuckles finally bumping into the frames of her glasses. Bringing them up to her face, she put them on, the world coming into focus once again.

Turning towards the door, she scanned across the room. Both Marlon and Piper were up, still sitting, and likely no less awake than she was.

“I’m going to wash my face,” she said, diplomatically, because if she wanted to feel like a human rather than a ghoul, she was going to have to.

Marlon nodded in the gloom, and that was all she really needed to know.

Wandering away from her bed, she paced over to the door and pulled it open, though not as far as Edith had. Again, the light blinded her, though for less time, and she was slipping out through the gap she’d made for herself not long after, stepping barefooted into the long hallway. All the other doors were closed, most of them other rooms like her own, except for one room in particular.

Taking the first door on her right, she pulled it open to reveal the squat, ugly and terribly old bathroom inside. Pawing around, she found the light switch and flicked it on, her face - stuck in a grimace - staring right back at her from the mirror above the sink.

She knew she didn’t look particularly good. Between the thin skin of her face that tugged against every sharp angle, the way she’d lost weight in all the wrong places, to the growing bruises under her own eyes, and the bloodshot quality of them aside. She didn’t look sick, but there was a fragility that reminded her somewhat of the bristles on a broom: pale and worn down from sweeping away messes.

She did her best not to dwell on her appearance most of the time. Not at the gaunt cheeks or the too-thin arms or the way her skin would break out at any given moment for no real reason other than that her body hated her. She knew that it was a game she couldn’t win; it wasn’t about to get much better, not when you took into account her sleeping arrangements.

She crept inside, not bothering to close the door behind her. Reaching forward, she twisted the tap.

The entire wall shuddered, creaked something awful.

But nothing came out.

She could feel a headache coming on, reaching up to rub at her eyes with her hand, nearly knocking her glasses completely from her face as she did.

Great. Now she needed to go and find someone to tell about the pipes, and it could just as easily be two in the morning as it could be somewhere closer to six. Just perfect.

Slapping the light off, she stepped back out of the bathroom and turned towards her room, easing the door open with her shoulder wide enough that she could at least read the analogue clock on the wall. Four-thirty in the morning.

Leah should be awake, in that case.

The other two occupants of the room were staring at her, a mix of confused and tired.

“The plumbing is out,” she explained, her voice rough. She coughed to clear it, grimacing. “I’m going to get Leah. Bring Aiden around if I’m not back in time for when he wakes up, okay?”

“...Okay,” Piper said, whisper-quiet.

Marlon just nodded.

Stepping inside, she wandered over to her bed, hunching down to grab her shoes. She slipped her bare feet into them, not particularly in the mood to war with socks, made sure they were at least mostly on, before turning back around and stepping back out into the hallway, shutting the door behind her.

The church was quiet as she passed through it, deafeningly so. The hallway her room was on especially so, with nobody else awake - and why would they be? - she passed through it without a sound. Stepping out into the main chapel, she scanned across it, just as empty as the rest of the church at the moment. All the desks and chairs scattered around gave it a messy appearance, though the place had been clearly packed up enough that nothing valuable had been left over.

Breathing out through her nose, Taylor kept her pace forward, arriving at the threshold into the west wing of the church. A long hallway with a staircase on one side greeted her, and she took the staircase, up to the second floor, taking the steps in pairs of two. As she got higher up, the overhead light charting her path, she started to hear it: more murmured conversation.

Most of the doors on the second floor were dark, no light filtering out beneath them, all but one. Wandering over to it, she brought her hand down against the door twice.

“One second!” Leah called out from inside. A quick mutter followed, then a beep, likely from a cell phone. Seconds later, the lock to the door clattered open, and the door threw itself open, Leah staring at her from the other side. “Taylor? What are you doing awake so early?”

“The plumbing’s out,” she offered instead of anything that might resemble an answer. “Couldn’t get any water out of the taps.”

Leah grunted, reaching up to comb a hand through her short hair. A nervous tic. She was wearing sweats and a sleeveless t-shirt, all the same uniform white. “Lemme grab my keys,” she said, leaving the door open as she wandered back inside. From what she could make out through the crack, her room had a bed, a desk, and several bookcases, but everything else was firmly out of view.

The door threw itself back open, Taylor stepping back as Leah stepped out, shutting and locking the door behind her. Wordlessly, she motioned for her to follow, and Taylor did.

They headed back down the stairs, down into the open chapel, and then out through the front doors. The air was just barely cold, and the sky was dark enough to make it feel like it still wasn’t dawn, even if she knew better. Leah led her off the main path, onto the grass, and they circled around the length of the church until they were on the opposite side, walking right up to a single, green-painted door with an “EMPLOYEES ONLY” sign on it.

She fed the doorknob her key, twisting it open.

The room inside had a few stairs leading down from the door, directly onto concrete. Concrete that was flooded, an inch or so of water covering the surface. The room was mostly filled in by a large boiler and a network of pipes, connected back up to a gauge system of some kind. One of the pipes, just above it, had a hairline crack running down it, and was venting a mist of water. The boiler looked to be completely inert, and the gauge system seemed to be off as well.

Leah groaned, reaching up to drag her hand down her face. “I’m going to have to call a plumber, at four in the morning. In a devastated city.”

“I could take a look at it.”

Leah glanced back at her, a bit dumbly. “You could take a look at it,” she repeated, dubiously.

“A plumber could take days,” Taylor said, and it was the truth, though her motive was more about keeping anyone from realizing her goggles were hiding in the radiator. “If you can let me try to figure out what’s wrong with it, I could probably fix it for now.”

Leah stared at her for a long moment, not judgement, just deeply inquisitive. “...You did fix the kitchen sink,” she conceded, after a moment. She glanced further into the room, leaning over the stairs and around the corner. Taylor followed her gaze, finding a shelf with a red toolbox in it and what looked like a variety of extra materials, probably specifically for repairs. “You can use anything in there if you need it, alright? But I need you to promise if you can’t think you can fix it, you’ll tell me. We can’t let this get any worse.”

“I promise,” she said, stepping down. Her shoes splashed the water a bit, and she could feel it even soaking somewhat into them. They were cheap, so it wasn’t a huge loss, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable.

“I’ll be in the chapel, doing some work, but I’ll check back in about half an hour, okay?”

Taylor turned to look at her, Leah lingering near the front door. She nodded.

Leah stepped back, easing the door mostly shut as she went.

Taylor turned back to the room, wandering over to the radiator that crawled across the wall. She leaned down, fitting her fingers beneath the metal plate that enclosed the thing, and twisted her fingers into the rubbery material of her goggles. She gave it a tug, and freed it from where it had been placed, dragging it out from within.

Her goggles were an old pair of swimmer’s goggles, with glass lenses. They had rubber surrounding each lens, with a strap that could be stretched out to fit around the head as needed. What she had done with it already had left one of the lenses with a dial around it, where she’d cut the glass lens in half and fitted metal in between after treating one of them, allowing her to adjust magnification. It wasn’t perfected right now, the dial stuck very easily, but it worked about as well as a spyglass would.

Her actual goal for them was to finish the part she was building to let her see through walls. She wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, and she didn’t have any of the resources needed for it, but it worked by somehow managing to pick up on an interference pattern that electricity gave off, or something like that. It would let her see wires in walls, and by extension, people on the other sides of them.

It was still, however, very much a work in progress.

Turning back around towards the shelf, she ambled over to it, picked the toolbox and some of the supplies off of it, and brought it back towards the cracked pipe and gauge. Popping the red toolbox open, she gave a look over what they had inside. A lot of basic tools, like wrenches, but not too much else. Taking what she needed, she stuffed her goggles inside, and turned her focus more entirely onto the problem at hand: the leakage.

Her power wasn’t giving her too much, but thankfully this plumbing system was old, and by extension rather overly-designed. She dragged her fingers over the system of gauges and knobs, her power beginning to filter ideas in, slowly, bit-by-bit. Natural wear and tear had resulted in a pipe bursting, the pressure of the system had vented with it, and now nobody could get any water, not even the boiler.

Walking back towards the shelf, she grabbed the roll of duct tape and some of the rubbery, pipe-shaped material that was there. For now, all she’d be able to do was reset the pressure and close up the breach, as she didn’t have any replacement pipes - or any real way to know how to do that, her power was mostly interested with the pressurization system and all the moving parts - or a welder, for that matter.

Twisting some of the knobs, the mist cut off with a creak, water dribbling out through the crack as fat teardrops instead.

She went about sealing the crack, applying tape, then rubber, then another layer of tape as tight as she could. Altogether, it took maybe five minutes, and after a few tests to see if her seal could hold up to the pressure - thankfully, by some miracle, it could - the boiler started rattling again, beginning to work as water was pumped back into the variety of pipes throughout the building.

Her eyes slipped back towards the supplies on the shelf. She had about another twenty minutes before anyone would come knocking, and she hadn’t completely finished the magnification on the other lens yet. She’d already cut the glass lens into two separate pieces, but she hadn’t fitted all the small parts which controlled the exact angles it worked at.

...And she had a lot of supplies to work with, here.

Slipping her goggles back out, she looked towards the materials she had left, back to her handiwork on the pipe.

How long would she have before the neo-nazis came back? How much time did she really have to prepare?

The heckling, she knew it wouldn’t be the last of it. She doubted they’d just take something like that sitting down. No, they’d be back for retaliation, and how far that went felt like it was up to whether or not she’d be able to step in to stop them.

Looking down at her goggles, she hesitated. As they were now, they covered about as much as a domino mask, but were clearly messily put together. The bits of metal she’d attached to the lenses stuck out against the beige-ish colour of the rubber. They wouldn’t conceal enough, though. She had ideas to start layering metal over the rubber to give it a more fixed dimension, and to conceal more of her appearance, and they _did_ have the metal and tools here that she could use.

She couldn’t just let them attack the shelter. Not like that. The goggles would let her spot attacks and hide her identity, simultaneously. She had to complete them, and soon.

Reaching for the supplies, she took some of the metal off, carrying the toolbox back over to the stairs leading down into the room itself. Placing the toolbox down next to her, she folded one leg over the other, balancing her mask on top of it as she pulled the right lens out.

Grabbing some of the sheet metal they’d left for her, as well as some needle-nose pliers, a hammer, and a few other tools, she started getting to work getting the precise bends and shapes she’d need.

She got maybe another ten minutes of work in, by which point she had managed to fold the metal into some of the small parts she needed to fit between the lenses, before there was another knock. Shoving the goggles away into the toolbox, she shuffled forward just in time to feel the door open behind her, her head turning around to spot Marlon and Aiden.

Aiden blinked sleepily at her, still in his pyjamas, wearing a set of oversized sneakers that she hadn’t seen on him before. He yawned, rubbing at his eyes as he toddled over and plopped down right next to her, his head coming to rest on her shoulder.

Turning her focus directly onto Marlon, she pushed her way through the animosity she felt for the other woman after a week of bickering and mouthed a ‘thank you’ in her direction.

Marlon just shook her head, giving her a sympathetic look, before stepping back out through the door and shutting it fully behind her.

Aiden wiggled against her shoulder, his attention drawn to the toolbox, where part of the goggles were still sticking out. She hoped Marlon hadn’t seen them, or if she had, had just assumed it was a bit of rubber to work with.

“Wanna watch me make something?” She asked, instead, glancing down at Aiden.

He nodded into her shoulder, saying nothing. The nightmare must’ve been particularly bad on him.

“You gotta keep it a secret, though, okay?”

Reaching for the goggles again, she pulled them out from within, balancing it back on her leg. She pulled out the shards of metal she had been working with as well, and started describing what she was doing to Aiden, as quiet as she could manage.

* * *

By the time the next knock on the door came, she had gotten some tangible work done. Both lenses were now capable of magnifying with a twist of a dial along their sides, and she had reinforced the area around the bridge of her nose with metal, though the plastic flaps on either far end of the goggles had to remain as they were until she could find more scrap to build out from.

All she really had to do outside of that was find some copper and maybe a few other odds and ends to finish the see-through-walls feature, and she’d be set.

The knock repeated, reminding her she was very much probably not supposed to be doing this. Shoving the goggles away, she listened to Aiden giggle, having gotten enthralled at some point by the idea that she was making secret inventions and taking it to heart.

The door behind her swung open, and Taylor turned just in time to spot Leah stepping through.

She also saw the PRT officer.

She felt her heart just about stop, seize in her chest painfully. Had someone noticed? Somebody might’ve told them, and they were here to recruit her. She couldn’t _go_ to the Protectorate, not with Shadow Stalker, not with the fact that they wouldn’t let her take care of Aiden, but if push came to shove, she might not have an option. She was without parents, a ward of the state, they could do anything they wanted to her before she officially became an adult.

“Good morning, Taylor,” Leah said, the light filtering in from behind her giving some context for the time. It was probably near seven o’clock now, however many hours since she’d first arrived here. It was eerie how easy it was to get lost building things, though Aiden seemed plenty interested. “Officer Lewis is just here to ask some follow-up questions about an incident.”

Her heart stopped hammering in her chest, and she found herself breathing out. The incident likely being the whole hassling thing that happened at the front of the shelter, then? It was weird they were coming to her, but—

“You were present at North Street’s Endbringer bunker, correct?”

She felt her heart stop again, in a different way. Discomfort swam behind her eyes, and she felt Aiden tense up, grip her arm harshly.

By the look of Leah’s face, she probably didn’t know he was about to ask that. She probably thought the same thing she did, and the horror gradually crawling over her face was, at least, reaffirming enough that she didn’t lose complete faith in her. Just some respect.

Breathing in, she steadied herself. “That’s correct,” she said, her voice forcefully neutral.

Officer Lewis smiled sadly at her. “I’m sorry that I have to ask you this,” he said, and she was fairly certain that was a lie, or just sympathy. He wasn’t sorry, he was just sorry that it had to be hurtful. “We’re looking for a clearer picture about what exactly happened that day.”

“Don’t you have access to the bunker itself?” She cut back, feeling her own breath tense. She hated thinking about that place, about being packed in like a sardine, nobody listening to her, endlessly surrounding her with noise and bodies. “Can’t you just go and look?”

Officer Lewis grimaced. “I’m afraid the Slaughterhouse 9 had... contingencies. We had enough time to acquire the records of who went there, as well as clear out some of the bodies, and take some video and photos, but currently the bunker is completely inaccessible.”

She forced herself to relax, reminded herself that this was just questioning. They just wanted to know what happened that day, not because they wanted to know the gruesome details, but because they wanted to help. She had to remind herself of that, had to repeat it endlessly in her head until it stuck.

“Fine, what do you need to know?”

Officer Lewis pulled out a notepad and a pen, glancing up at her as he flipped it open. “How did the crowd know it was them?”

Her brain froze at that. She breathed in, calmed herself, then let it out. “I was trapped at the time,” she offered, for lack of anything better to say. “I... couldn’t really see it—and it’s hard to remember what I could. But their disguises, I think the disguises they had stopped working for some reason.”

She remembered the screams when they had. She’d just been coming out of that confused haze, assaulted by a hundred different senses, the first time she had been able to sense those motes of light. Things had been almost in flux, at the moment, and the memories were all blurry and indistinct. She had the impression she’d lost time somewhere in there, at least once, but all she could really remember were the snapshots.

Freeing her legs by using her teleportation ability for the first time. Picking Aiden up from where he was covered in gore. Seeing Bonesaw’s tiny body curled up on the man she later figured out was Jack Slash, stumbling out of the shelter among the crowd of screaming civilians. Impressions of the moment, something she hadn’t been involved with.

“Did you notice anything odd?” Officer Lewis asked, staring at her.

“No,” she lied. Getting powers was odd, getting _four_ was odd. But he didn’t need to know that. “Nothing odder than what happened. I wasn’t part of the group that mobbed them, I only saw their bodies.”

Jack Slash’s head, just about pulped across the floor, a cinder block next to it. Bonesaw’s neck, snapped at an odd angle. Other members of that group; a dark-skinned woman whose head had been crushed against the wall, glass shards in her costume, who only could be Shatterbird—

She breathed in, out. Nausea swam in her throat, and she swallowed it back down, tightened her grip on Aiden as he did much the same.

“Can you list who you saw?” Officer Lewis asked, next, staring at her with an apologetic look.

“Jack Slash, Bonesaw, Mannequin for a few moments, the two creatures he had with him—one had claws, the other was... I don’t even know how to explain it. Shatterbird, too; they beat her head against the wall until she died. There was another girl...”

Her mind scoured for the memory, stumbling over it. The girl with all of those awful tattoos, spread across her body in a horrifying display.

“I think the mob drowned her, in one of the containers we had that was full of fresh water.”

The officer made a face, but jotted it down anyway.

“Thank you for this—I can tell you that you’ve filled in some gaps we didn’t know we had,” the officer said, at last, closing the notebook. He pocketed it again, smiling at her. “If you do think of anything odd you saw, feel free to come down to the downtown shelter. Our office is always open.”

“I will,” she lied, again.

The officer nodded, muttered a thanks towards Leah, who was still standing there, paralyzed. He wandered back out through the door, and vanished around the corner.

Aiden wormed his way into her lap, curling in closer. She pressed her nose into his hair, grounded herself with the fact that he was still here. She had survived it, he had survived it. Her anchor was still stable.

“I—I’m sorry you had to experience that,” Leah said, from behind, her voice tremulous. “Both of you.”

Taylor shook her head. “People suffered worse,” she deflected, turning the question away.

Leah breathed out a sigh, a soft, tired noise. “Thank you, again, for repairing the plumbing. Just... put the toolbox back, when you’re done.”

There were footsteps, shuffling behind her.

“I’m sorry,” Leah said again, at last. She left, after that, shutting the door behind her.

It was weird, how things worked like that. She thought she had managed to climb over that experience, to stomp it down with the rest of the problems she was having. That just some questions could bring her right back to those sensations, to everything, it... hurt. She didn’t want to be weak.

Couldn’t be weak. If she was, Aiden would be at risk.

She had to get better. Had to protect him.

Threats would keep coming back around, they always would. That was a reminder, in a way, that things were never safe enough. Not quite.

No, she needed to complete those goggles. Get herself ready for when things got bad again, when the other shoe dropped.

She just had to find where to hide them, next time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter, bright and early in the morning.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


	5. Containment 1.5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: A pretty bad person drops an r-slur in this chapter, so be warned about that.

Piper's bed was stripped bare. The sheets had been collected, stuffed into a garbage bag, and her personal belongings had been shoved off to the side, just to make sure nobody could get near them.

It was just her, Aiden, and Leah in the room. Marlon, Edith and Cleo had already left to do their chores for the day, and to possibly put some distance between themselves and the room. Taylor couldn't blame them, not really.

She'd woken up that morning to an unresponsive Piper running a high fever. They'd figured out something was wrong when she didn't wake up, despite being the lightest sleeper out of everyone, and that wrongness had only intensified when Piper had started coughing. Wet, hoarse wheezes and choking sounds, bad enough that Taylor had found herself keeping the others away from her, just in case it might be transmissible.

Once they'd brought the nurses down - in the process attracting Leah's attention - and got Piper sent off to the infirmary, Leah had brought in a garbage bag and some gloves and got everyone to strip down her bed.

"We're going to have to burn the blankets," she had said, looking at the five of them sadly. "The nurses think it might just be trauma, and poor nutrition and hygiene, but just to be safe we still have to."

After another request to tell her if they saw anyone flagging, the rest of her roommates had slowly left, off to go and do their chores. Today had been her day off, by comparison, and while she didn't particularly want to be in the room, Leah showed no real signs of wanting to leave herself. There was something deeply awkward shared among the three of them, something that made conversation nearly impossible. Between Leah's sad looks, to Aiden quite literally hiding behind her back, to her own inability to break the silence, she found herself paralyzed.

"You did the best you could," Leah said at last, cutting through her thoughts and dragging her back into the present. She looked tired, more than usual. Each day seemed to add depth and bruising to the bags under her eyes, and there wasn't enough makeup on the planet to hide them at this point. “I’ll get her things brought up to the infirmary when someone’s free, okay?”

Taylor nodded, not knowing what else to do. She had some ideas for what she was going to do today, most of that being looking through the book she’d only barely managed to crack open the night before. That and maybe work on her goggles, which she had hidden away in her bag for the time being. “I’ll wait around,” she said. “I was just going to get some reading done.”

Leah’s face winced, stuck in a bit of a half-grimace. “Taylor,” she started, and Taylor could already feel her day’s plans begin to go up in smoke. “I really hate to ask you this, but you’re one of the few responsible people I trust right now.”

Aiden butted his head against her spine, a quiet protest to what was about to happen. She leaned back against him a little, and he dug his head in, somewhat like a cat.

“Piper had duties today, specific ones she was chosen for. Because she was Neil’s—Officer Atkinson’s—kid, people trusted her, and she was decent at community outreach, doing errands, getting info, that sort of thing.” Leah pulled a wad of paper out from her pocket, a pen from the other, and started jotting something down. “But she can’t do that today, and I really need some of this done. I would appreciate it so much if you could do this for me. You’ll be free for the rest of the day, I promise.”

This wasn’t something she could really turn down. It would be counterproductive if she did; Leah might be able to find someone else, but... well, she didn’t really trust anyone else to do it, clearly. Breathing out a reedy sigh through her nose, she found herself giving in to it. “I’ll do it.”

Aiden whined a little, frustrated. She reached behind, smoothing her fingers through his hair until he settled.

Leah ripped the paper free from the rest of it, crossing the remainder of the room and handing it over to her.

Taylor turned the sheet around, scanned down the contents.

_Storeroom - get information on current supplies, how long until we need resupplies._

_Pick up a notepad and pen from here, too._

_Big tent - info on required food, beds, a tally of new arrivals._

_Biggest tent in the camp, you can find it pretty easily. NW of entrance._

_Rescue workers - updates on the state of The Docks, rescues, salvage._

_Can find them next to where we had the bonfire._

_Liaison - info on next PRT visit, pass over details on the outbreak._

_Richard can be found at the front of the camp, next to the east entrance._

She glanced up from it, Leah looking back at her. “Who are the rescue workers?”

“They’re some guys from all of the shelters who came around to try to get people out of The Docks, and stuff they might’ve left over,” Leah offered. “They’re working on an agreement to get some boats to go out into the more flooded parts. There’s a surprising amount of people who survived the flooding, and not all of them have made it to shore yet.”

“The liaison?”

“Richard Hawk,” Leah supplied. “He’s older, early fifties, and has been doing security detail since Neil fell sick. He works with the PRT, every shelter has one to pass on information about the current state of things. A bit prickly, but I think you’ll get along.”

Glancing back down at the list, she nodded.

“Come back to me when you’re done. I’ll be in the chapel again, and after that, you’ll be completely free to do whatever you want, I promise.” With that, Leah was gone, leaving out through the door without closing it behind her.

Aiden made another whine. “Don’t wanna.”

“We have to,” Taylor informed him, as he’d apparently regathered his courage now that Leah was out of earshot.

“Bad,” Aiden complained.

She stepped away from him, ignoring questing fingers trying to grab onto her shirt, turning around. Aiden stared at her, and thankfully he’d managed to get dressed before all of this had taken place. He might not be a toddler, but a five-year-old with a commitment to not doing what you wanted could be just as difficult, especially because unlike toddlers, he could be rather smart at times.

“I’ll read you Owl Moon again, if you go along with this,” she bartered. She was still working through the book she’d gotten from the library at this point, and it might slow things down, but a fussy Aiden was honestly worse than the alternative at this point. If somehow that failed, she could probably barter bringing him up to the roof to do some birdwatching. It wouldn’t be easy to do without getting caught, but she’d do it if it meant he didn’t fuss.

“Twice,” he countered, folding his arms over his chest, pressing his lip out in a bit of a pout.

“Deal.” She extended her hand for him to take, which he did, shaking it. “Now, get your shoes on.”

It took another five minutes for him to manage as much, but not too long after they were out of the chapel, treading only soggy grass. The sky above had cleared to the clearest it had been in days, the sky not one vast sheet of cloud but rather merely heavily inundated with them. She could even see a sliver of sunlight slipping between two particularly large clouds as she walked.

Aiden clung to her for most of the journey up to the storeroom, gripping her sleeve with a strangle-tight focus.

Knocking on the door with the hand not currently occupied being Aiden’s stress ball, she was beckoned in by whoever was behind it, pushing the door open and stepping back into the gloomy, shaded interior.

This time around, both people looking after the storeroom were visible. One was the same person from before, a woman with short, choppy blonde hair and about half a head on Taylor herself. A pistol was holstered to her thigh, open and visible, and she was wearing a dress shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans.

The other was a man, bulky and stout, if not fat. He had plenty of weight to him, but it was hard to tell if it was muscle or pounds, and when the distinction to something like that becomes blurry, you can generally assume it’s both. He had a pistol on his hip as well, and a bit of a recessed chin that made the rest of his bulk look out of place. He was staring, gimlet and untrusting, at her.

The woman smiled in her direction, nonetheless. “What can I do you for?”

“Piper’s fallen sick,” Taylor opened, watching as a bit of worry flashed over not just the woman’s face, but the man’s as well. “So I’m doing her rounds in her place. I need a notepad, a pen, and also information on the status of your supplies.”

The woman nodded, ducking down beneath the desk she had been perched on, fishing a notebook and a plastic-wrapped set of four pens out from inside. After prying the packaging off, she fished a pen out, clipped it onto the rings of the notebook, and handed both over to her.

Taylor flipped it open, uncapped the pen, and looked towards her.

“We’ve got a good surplus on food right now,” the woman explained, Taylor jotting it down as she continued. “Water too, but we’re running low on medication, and a lot of vitamins. We have maybe about a week or two before a resupply will be necessary, maybe three if we start limiting calories down to a thousand or so a day.”

“Anything else?” she inquired, just to be sure.

The woman shook her head. “No.”

“How’s Neil doing?” The man asked, his voice a low, rasping sort of voice. It reminded her of a smoker’s voice, clogged almost.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, looking in his direction. “But I don’t think he’s gotten any better.”

The man’s face tightened, but said nothing else, just nodding in her direction.

They left, after that, stepping back out onto wet grass. She turned towards the tents, the ones that extended out from the church in lines. The shed was still on church property, in a way, separated from the tents and other ramshackle shelters by a raised bit of earth, with stairs the only way to get up onto it.

She walked towards it, Aiden keeping a grip on the hem of her shirt now that he couldn’t have her arm.

The camp could be separated up into quarters. The north-east quarter of the camp was a construction area, visible even before she reached the stairs. Long tents and wooden boards laid around as people, looking tired and wet, navigated with bits of material slung over their shoulders.

The north-west of the camp was the residential area, and where her target was. The big tent did stand out among them, almost close to those tents you saw in circus troupes. Most of the tents around there were patchwork and frayed, made from parts to offer shelter when they didn’t entirely have enough of it.

The other quarters, out of sight, included the south-east, which used to be the parking lot for the church. It was around where the bonfire and basketball court was, and was also mostly residential, though it was mostly filled in by people living in cars and other vehicles. The south-west was more of an open area for the community, she could vaguely recall picnics and stuff happening out there, back before everyone had given up on the weather and decided they would rather not be rained on.

Climbing down the steps, she made her way into the north-west quarter of the camp. The people here, walking between the tents, regarded her warily, and looked just as tired as the people she had spotted in the construction area. They left her be, thankfully, but gave her a wide berth and uneasy expressions.

She didn’t know why, but she didn’t really have time to think about it.

The big tent itself was taller than a house, and the front flaps had been left open, letting the air in. She had to duck to step through it, and as she transitioned from grass to a tarp-like floor, she was struck by just how... messy it was.

Dozens of people laid or sat around inside of the tent, laid out on mats and in some cases nothing at all. Most people didn’t have a pillow, and almost everyone there, with the exception of the handful of people who were still standing, looked uncomfortable, sick and exhausted. The air had an odd scent to it, like something overripe, and there were more flies in the tent than there probably were outside, buzzing noisily in the air.

Someone broke free from the group of people standing around, an older-looking woman with dusky brown skin. She looked at her as she approached, long strides of her legs carrying her over some bodies and around others. She was wearing just jeans and a t-shirt, but both were stained and frayed, looking like they’d been through more than a little abuse.

“Can I help you?” The woman asked, her voice oddly creaky. Still, her face was open, if not eager, and that was an improvement from the people outside. “If you’re looking for shelter, we can help, but you may have to wait for a bed.”

Retrieving her notepad and pen from the side of her body, she raised it up in front of her, shaking her head. “I’m here to do a tally on food, beds, and any new arrivals.”

The woman’s face didn’t get any less neutral, but it certainly closed off. Her face grew a bit stiff, colder, but not by too much. She went from open to professional, in a way. “We need more beds, we have twenty or more people who don’t have one, and we need more tents, as well. Tents less so, but we’re running out of them. Fuller meals, vitamins, and heaters would also be very appreciated, at this time.”

Jotting it down, she couldn’t help but look around, between the people on the ground. “What’s going on with this?” She asked, trying not to sound judgemental, but ultimately not sure how else to put it.

“People on different sleep schedules, and the fact that many families are waiting for a tent big enough to fit all of them,” she explained, a touch tightly. “Some can’t get up anymore, as well.”

“Wait,” she interrupted, because that last bit seemed terribly relevant. “What do you mean they can’t get up anymore?”

The woman stared at her for a long, long moment, reluctance crossing over her face. Finally, she opened her mouth. “Exhaustion from many sources, mental or physical, have tired people out. Sometimes that means they collapse after working for too much, other times it’s that they cannot find the energy to do much anymore. People have lost a lot, over the last few weeks.” She sighed, folding her arms in front of her, almost hugging herself. “Yet more have had exhaustion that just doesn’t leave, that they’re stuck with. A sickness of the mind or body, it doesn’t matter, the end result is the same. I think a lot of it is Leviathan, a lot of people are traumatized, unmoored, but...”

“Shouldn’t they be in the infirmary?” Taylor interjected, hating that she didn’t even sound all that certain to her own ears.

“The doctors say it isn’t _serious_ enough, and they’re already short on beds,” the woman replied glibly, motioning around her. “We have already been turned away, on that front. We need doctors, someone to visit. This exhaustion, it could be anything, a sickness or a parasite, but we just _don’t know_. It’s pervasive among the ones who work, but everyone here works, outside of the children and infirm. We need more help.”

Finishing her notes down, she flipped the page over, not quite able to keep the frown from her face. This... she knew she could only live in the church because she was a volunteer. The others who lived there were the infirm, the pregnant, people who couldn’t weather being outside, but...

She hadn’t thought it was _this_ bad.

She glanced around, took in the sight. Nobody but the woman was looking at her, most people laid out on mats were either asleep or staring off into the middle distance.

She could be one of them, she realized. That could be here, on the ground, unable to cope with the fact that everything she knew was gone, and content to lay, motionless, as people around her wonder what broke. Would Aiden be out there, too? If she wasn’t there for him? She didn’t want to think about it. She was lucky, in so many ways, that she had an anchor, had something to look after, that she had an actual roof over her head with heating and lighting.

Pulling herself back, she breathed in, tried not to let the unease dwell too much in her head. “Thank you,” she said, looking at the woman.

The woman merely nodded.

She stepped back, ducking back out through the tent with Aiden, and now she felt the stares, knew what they were. She was an outsider, in a lot of ways. She hadn’t internalized it by now, but those gazes, they were wary because she wasn’t one of them. She was getting preferential treatment while the rest of the people were stuck in drafty tents, surrounded by the exhausted, working themselves to unconsciousness.

She even looked different to them, and it made their stares much more understandable, even expected. She was clean, well-rested, she didn’t look even half as worn down as everyone out here, and that made her stand out among them. It was an uncomfortable feeling, prickling at the edges of her awareness.

The dish pit no longer felt like such a tedious chore, with context.

She still had to turn away from it, though. She gave a quick look to Aiden, who stared back up at her, bored but ultimately unaware of the looks, the wariness. Possibly because they were mostly directed at her, not at the child she had with her.

It was a small mercy he wasn’t more aware of that sort of thing. He had bad enough anxiety in the first place, adding this to the pile would probably make it impossible to get him out of the church.

Thankfully, though, she wasn’t going to be sticking around in there to feel their judgement. She made a straight line, passing around the outer perimeter of the church as she headed south, down towards where they’d had the bonfire. The crowds thinned out, and familiar faces replaced ones she didn’t know. Not people she knew personally, but ones she had seen around the church, ones less likely to look at her like she was an outsider. Like she wasn’t one of them.

Finding her bearings was easy with the landmarks. Her eyes went first to the half-broken basketball court, then the little lip she remembered being the top of the incline leading down into the bonfire pit. Just as Leah had mentioned, there was a small crowd of people a ways to the side of that lip, placed neatly between the two landmarks she had just used to figure out where she was.

Most of the people there wore outdoorsy gear, the sort of durable clothing you'd need to survive tromping through bushes full of thorns and sharp branches. Boots, thick-woven pants, clothes that covered most of the body to keep as much delicate skin protected as possible. Some among them, however, looked distinctly different, with brightly-coloured rubber equipment, like suspender pants, boots, hip waders and the like. They had clothes which were more worn-down under it, as well as rubber gloves, looking like they'd been dressed to go rummaging through a swamp.

Her eyes caught on one of them. He had pale skin and dusky-brown hair, cut short around his ears. His build was a bit broad, but tall, giving him something of a triangular appearance. She was caught by an odd thread of familiarity, one which only grew in intensity as she approached.

Heads turned in response to her arrival, finally close enough that they could hear her footsteps.

Kurt, one of her father’s coworkers, and one of the very few people she knew from his job, stared back at her.

She felt her breathing stop.

Kurt’s face lit up, surprised and happy. He stumbled around, approaching unsteadily. “ _Taylor?_ ” he muttered, startled, so hopeful.

She almost shrunk back from it, but he didn’t give her much of a chance. Before she knew it, he had closed the distance between herself and the group and wrapped her in a tight, firm hug.

Other people were staring at her, she could see them from over Kurt’s shoulder, boggling, but that wasn’t what she focused on. All she could think about was how familiar he smelled, that same brand of deodorant or shampoo that her father used, mixed with a tinge of oil, of salt and seawater that came with working down near the water and shipyard.

He pulled back, grasping both of her shoulders, looking giddy. “Your father, is he—”

She shook her head, unable to summon the words.

Kurt’s face fell, pity flickering across it that she wanted to slap off of his face. Genuine grief overcame it, though, and it blunted the anger. “I... assumed so. Did you find him?”

“Under the house,” she said, quiet. She wasn’t sure what her voice sounded like, but to her ears it was distant, neutral. “Dead when I got there. I buried him.”

“ _Oh_ , honey.”

She was wrapped up in another hug, drawing her in close, pressing her face against his nape.

She hated it. She didn’t like being coddled, didn’t like feeling like she might be _allowed_ to let go and break into pieces.

Pressing her hands against his chest, she firmly eased him back, pulling herself back together as the distance between the two of them grew. She pulled herself back together for Aiden, for herself, for her future, and got over herself. Buried her emotions back where they needed to be, like she might be able to scrub the film of weakness off of her soul.

Kurt had turned, waving a hand over to the other guys in rubber overalls and boots, the group wandering over.

“This is Danny’s kid,” he explained. “And... we can call off the search for him. He’s gone.”

She didn’t recognize a single face among the crowd, outside of Kurt, but plenty of the faces fell, a mixture of emotions swimming over them. People walked up to her, extended their hands, offered their names, and she found herself shaking them back, playing along so that they didn’t feel like they were being turned away, but she took none of it in.

By the time the last person had said his condolences, she couldn’t remember a single name out of them. It was like her brain was a leaky sieve, dripping out the parts she was supposed to be paying attention to.

But then Kurt was back, and the familiarity grounded her, anchored her in the present. “I bet you’re surprised to see the DWU working like this, eh?”

She... was, honestly. She hadn’t been involved in Dad’s work, hadn’t really given it much thought. She wished she had, of course, but she had been innocent, a teenager, and what teenage girl wants to hear about her dad who works in a _union_?

“Well, basically,” Kurt continued, taking her silence for agreement. “We had a surplus of small boats left over, back when one of your Dad’s big deals fell through. We’ve been using them to get people out of The Docks, especially in the more flooded region, where you can’t even stand. We’ve been tracking down personal stuff, too, if your house is still standing, anyway.

“We’re here today because we’ve come to an agreement with the folks in your shelter, actually. The church is a near-perfect jumping-off point to make a stop at, especially considering we’re currently based out of the coastal part of The Trainyard, near where it dips down into what used to be the north pier. DWU headquarters used to be there, actually.”

“That’s...” What could she say? “Good?”

Kurt smiled. “It is. We’ve been doing a lot, actually. The beached boats from the ship graveyard that Leviathan dug up? They’re all along the shoreline, near down where Lord Street’s Market used to be, but further down the coast too. It’s like a city, especially where the ships managed to get to dry land, which is becoming more common as the water level slowly drops. I don’t think it’ll ever drop low enough to make The Docks dry again, not without some reshaping, but I think we’ve been doing good work anyway. Keeping the spirit of the union alive, and all that.”

Shouldn’t she be happy about this? This... might not be what Dad wanted for the city, but he would be delighted at this. The Dockworkers finding a place in the dynamics of the city, helping people? That’s what he always said the union was around for. Well, that and beating back opportunistic billionaires, anyway. They’ve made tangible moves to improve people’s lives.

...And her dad had nothing to do with it. Not even remotely.

The wound felt rawer, at that realization. She felt _spiteful_ , deeply and cynically. Wanted to ask how dare they continue on, to have the _gall_ to improve without her father.

But she can’t. It wasn’t rational, it was just... grief.

She wanted to stop feeling it, one of these days.

Kurt was looking at her though, a worried wrinkle to his brow. “Taylor, are you... okay?”

“As much as I can be,” she replied, her voice slipping out flatter than she intended.

Kurt smiled, a little sad, a little understanding. “Well, care to introduce me to the little guy who’s been giving me the stink eye this entire time?”

Right. Aiden, she’d—she’d nearly forgotten he was there. Bad. She shook her focus out, glancing down, and spotted him glaring possessive, nearly poisonous daggers at Kurt.

“This is Aiden,” she introduced, slipping down a bit into a crouch so she could wrap an arm around him, hug him close. Even if she felt alone at times, he shouldn’t ever have to. His body relaxed against her touch, soothed. “I... I’ve been taking care of him, ever since his mom died.”

Kurt looked at her, and in his expression she found a soft sort of _awe_. Maybe he saw how she looked at Aiden, maybe it was because she was just doing it. She didn’t know. “You got the best of both parents,” he said, with complete sincerity. “I want you to know that.”

The words slammed into her gut like a hammer, made her want to curl over and die a little. It was both good and so, so completely bad. She felt heat burn at the back of her eyes, but swallowed the tears down before they could emerge. Couldn’t be seen as weak, not right now.

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted, rising to her feet, Aiden squawking a little as she let go of him, nearly toppling. “I need to get information from these guys for Leah, we—we’ll talk later?”

Kurt nodded. “Later.”

She pulled away, achingly, from the familiarity. She stepped, not just away from Kurt, but back into the shoes of someone doing a job, wandering back towards the people she was more familiar with. People who also slept in the church. One of them broke off from the crowd, a large man, easily six foot, who was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, both inscribed with little paw-prints that seemed to have been added with permanent markers.

The man’s smile was pitying, understanding, and she rankled beneath it, but kept it all below the surface, refused to let it swim beyond just her mind.

“Leah sent me over, since Piper’s sick, to get information on The Docks,” she explained, tugging her notepad back up, readying her pen. Aiden clung to her leg, stubborn, and she didn’t have it in her to shake him off or tell him to quit it, even as frayed as she felt.

“Shit, Pipes, really?” The man frowned, shook his head. “That’s a shame, I hope she gets better. But as Kurt said, the docks are stabilizing after the flooding,” he explained and Taylor started writing it down, note-by-note. “Some areas are draining out, others are getting deeper, but overall it’s getting better. Parts of the coast are, however, _very_ unstable. We had several sinkholes open up a few days back, tens of feet deep, we think down into some of the caves beneath the city.

“The boats that were beached near the high-ground have been somewhat colonized by a few communities that were incredibly reluctant to leave it, claiming they lived here before. We’re not sure what we’ll do with them, but as of yesterday, there were only about thirty people. We’ve fished several people out of The Docks over the last few days, in large part because the sinking of The Docks was staggered, we think. People had enough time to rush away before everything dropped, if they weren’t trapped anyway. Things are going good, otherwise, and we think we’ll have a retrieval process working by the end of next week, especially if we get the gasoline we need to fuel the boats.”

She finished jotting it down, her handwriting more chicken scratch than normal, her hand shaky. She swallowed, tightening her resolve, demanding her body at least stop shaking for ten _fucking_ —

She breathed in, out. Another one of those thoughts that weren’t hers. She had anger issues, yes, but... not like that. That was rage. She buried it, dug her heels in, and plastered a fake smile across her face, directing it at the large man in front of her. “Thank you.”

The man nodded, not commenting on it.

She just had to get away from _this_. Away from Kurt’s softness, away from pity and condolences, or she was going to explode on someone. Thankfully, her next destination wasn't too far off, and she spared very little time excusing herself before she was walking towards it, a little faster than might be useful, Aiden having returned to grabbing at the tail of her shirt, grumbling beneath his breath.

She couldn’t... couldn’t deal with that right now. She’d deal with his annoyance in a bit, she’d touch on it. Care for him, like she always did, but she just needed to _breathe_.

The camp fell away, in a way. Crowds thinned out before becoming absent completely, the east gate of the camp visible, but a far distance away. Nobody really frequented it, because it only really led onto a road that would bring you back around to the front, as the only other direction it would point you in is towards The Docks. It might get more traffic with the rescue workers, but even she wasn’t sure about that.

It was quiet, only the sound of bugs and the wind catching on debris and trees.

It was so quiet that she heard it before she saw it. The rumbling of a vehicle, choked off and familiar.

...There shouldn’t be anyone going there.

Slowing her pace, she heard a bark of laughter pick up, carrying over the sound of the vehicle. Something sunk in her stomach, and she crouched, lowering herself down as she passed across the grass of the open field, off towards the noise, the laughter and jeering.

She drew on her powers, her heart hammering in her chest. Rats responded to her, and she took their senses for her own, spreading them out as they emerged from the tall grass around her, scrambling forward and down beneath the fence.

The pickup truck from last time, as mud-stained as ever, just with ten people instead of three.

Near the gate, laying face-down, was the liaison, his body motionless, his head left with a bleeding dent in it, sluggishly leaking onto the ground in front of him.

“I didn’t know he’d _die_ ,” one of the guys protested, though there was humour in his voice.

“He’s like seventy, you retard,” another said, just as mockingly. “Of course he died.”

She was right. They had come back, and they were clearly not playing around.

Her body moved before she knew what she was doing. She tucked an arm under Aiden’s torso, hefting him up, carrying him against her front. She hushed him as he yelped, pressing his face against her shoulder as her legs, still aching from the day before, picked up into a sprint. The wet grass slipped against her shoes, giving her no traction, but she tore in a straight path back towards the camp.

People jolted up as they saw her run past, stared as she nearly skipped the stairs up the raised bit of earth, sprinted up to the front doors and ducked around the plaque. She shoved the door open with her shoulder, battering against it.

The chapel was packed, dozens of people turning to stare at her.

Leah emerged out from the crowd, seeing her face, her panic. She glanced around, at her, at Aiden, maybe looking for wounds. “What’s wrong?”

“The E88 are back,” she said, as quickly as she could. “They killed the person you had guarding the east gate, and they’ve got weapons.” She should’ve checked to see what they were, but digging into her brain, she could remember some. A gun-like shape under one shirt, a bat in another. A mixture of weapons. She didn’t know, she didn’t—

Leah’s hand landed on her shoulder, her face cycling from horror to anger and then grief, before hardening into something sharp. She turned back towards the crowd, raising her arm and her voice. “Lock this place down!” She yelled out, and like a gunshot, people moved, rushing around in panicked groups.

Turning back to her, Leah flicked her eyes towards one of the church’s wings, her face creasing. “I need you to follow me,” she said, looking directly at her. “We need to respond to this, and quickly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter! Early in the morning, as usual. Hope you enjoyed.


	6. Containment 1.6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for some gore and mentions of dead animals.

“I need you to tell me what you saw over there.”

Leah’s hand rested against her elbow, guiding her away from the chapel, towards the infirmary. Her stride was slow, compensating for the fact that Taylor was a hair away from wheezing up a lung from the sprint over, but she moved with a certain urgency, almost pushing her onward.

Behind her, the dull roar of the crowd had grown to something more harried, louder and more panicked, accompanied by a cacophony of clattering chairs and tables, loud enough that Aiden was flinching away from it, burrowing deeper into her side as furniture screeched and scraped across the floor. They were preparing for the worst, building barricades, defences.

Taylor swallowed, her throat dry. Her thoughts were twisted into knots, not helped by how out of breath she was, each intake of air now accompanied by a raw pain in her chest. She didn’t even know where to start with what she saw, her memories were a complete mess.

“What do you need to know?” She managed, fumbling the words as Leah pressed them forward, guiding them down the hallway that led towards the infirmary. Each new breath brought a little more clarity back to her head, made the world fall just a little more into focus.

She still didn’t know why they were going towards the infirmary, but at this point, she was willing to put her trust in Leah.

“How many people?” Leah started, her legs picking up their pace.

That... “Around ten,” she replied. She wasn’t entirely sure, but it seemed to be about that much.

“What sort of weapons did they have?”

She struggled with that one, struggled to remember much beyond the half-flashes she’d gotten from the rodents under her control. She clenched her eyes shut, tried to visualize, to get _anything_.

“A gun, I think,” she started, haltingly. “Bats, blunt weapons—a truck, the same pick up from before.”

She should’ve let some rodents there, at least one, to watch. Stupid. She had just focused so much on getting Aiden _away_ that she hadn’t even considered it. She had to do better.

“More than one truck?” Leah queried, snapping her out of her thoughts. Her eyes blinked back open, the infirmary starting to come into view.

“I don’t think so.” She would’ve noticed it, if they had. Still, something—right. “I don’t think they intended to kill the guard, they mentioned it was an accident.”

Not that they had seemed all that broken up about it.

The infirmary fell into focus as they drew closer. There were a few nurses on break outside of the door, talking quietly with one another. Next to them, there was a table with a box on top of it, a small note beside it reading _please take one if you enter, thank you_. The hallway was one of the few with windows, lining the wall to her left and letting what light there was in, while also giving a fairly good vantage point on the camp down below.

“Do you think they can be reasoned with?”

Taylor turned to look at her, found Leah staring her down with an intense, if unreadable expression.

She remembered the way they treated the death of another person. It had been waved off, more of a nuisance than the loss of an entire _person_ , like it wasn’t a big deal. Like they could do it again without much hesitation.

She tightened her hand around Aiden’s, just to remind her that he was safe and alive.

“No,” she said, quiet. “I don’t think so.”

Leah nodded, letting go of Taylor's elbow as she stepped past her with long, almost jog-like strides. The nurses turned as she approached, one of them fumbling a pack of cigarettes back into his jacket pocket.

Taylor stepped forward, following after.

“I need you guys to start locking down,” Leah announced, voice firm. “We're about to be attacked.”

The nurses jolted, inaction replaced with a burst of panic. Some of them glanced around, looking for whatever imagined threat they thought was about to come, while others were already edging themselves towards the infirmary door.

“Before that,” Leah intercepted, stepping towards the door and halting their progress. “I need to go in there—I need to see Officer Atkinson.”

A nurse broke from the rest, glancing back at her peers as she approached. Not slowing her stride, Leah stepped up to the table just next to the door, retrieving what Taylor now realized was a mask from a larger box of them, tucking the straps up and over her ears.

Finally, Leah looked back towards the nurses.

The nurse reached out and pulled the door open for Leah. “He’s near the back,” the woman explained, voice quiet. “He’s in fairly bad shape, I’m not sure if he’ll be too aware of you.”

“He doesn’t necessarily have to be conscious,” Leah said tiredly. She turned as she stepped towards the door, catching Taylor’s eye. “Stay out here for now, okay?”

She nodded. With that, Leah slipped through the opening that had been made for her, one of her hands coming out to snag the knob as she passed, drawing it shut behind her with a quiet _click_.

Turning away from the door, Taylor watched the nurses mill, pace nervously in place. There were maybe four women, two men, and they were all dressed similarly. Scrubs, gloves, some of them even still had a mask dangling from the side of their face, hooked over one ear.

Just watching them was making her feel antsy, uncertain. Like their nervousness was bleeding over into her.

Turning away, she glanced back towards the windows, nudging Aiden so that he followed her the few steps it took her to come nearly flush with them.

She could almost see the message about an oncoming attack spread through the camp, a tide of people talking to people and looking panicked. Dozens of them at once were rushing over to tents, banging on them, yelling, and when the people would emerge, most of them young girls, boys, teenagers—even some parents with their kids—they’d be guided elsewhere by some of the adults.

...But not towards the church.

She watched a smaller group pull away, tuck into one of the larger tents in this quarter of the camp. Group after group was directed back towards it.

“...Why aren't they coming to the church?” The words spilled out, unbidden. She couldn't help it, looked back at the nurses and found not the recognition she was looking for, but rather blankness. Like they hadn't ever considered the notion.

“There’s not enough room,” one of them said, haltingly.

But wasn’t there? The chapel hadn't been even close to full when they had left. More importantly, it wasn't as though everyone had to crowd into the chapel in the first place: they could put them in any number of wings. They would have more than enough room.

She opened her mouth to tell them as much, to get something more than a half-baked answer, but the nurse was already cutting her off.

“They know their places to hide,” she stressed, folding her arms over her chest defensively. “We don’t have enough time.”

Why not make the church the fallback point in the first place? It was at the dead center of the camp, something that had been effectively built out from it. It was the best-defended spot, why even leave it up to chance?

The faces of the nurses were closed off, so she didn’t even bother trying to ask. It probably wasn’t something they had been directly involved with in the first place, they might have their own reservations about it. She didn’t know.

The silence stretched on for another few seconds before the doorknob clattered, twisting once before being pulled open. Leah stepped out, and it felt like she was a different person.

She had a pistol in her hand, handling it with practiced ease, like it was an old friend. A holster had been strung over her hip, with two additional magazines for the gun tucked away in it. She was holding herself differently, too, her face was unreachable and cold, her posture was stiff and alert. She didn’t resemble the Leah that Taylor knew, the one who had smiled sadly at her during her first day, the one who had looked after dozens of other people in an identical situation to her, everyone there hurting and raw, ready to lash out.

That Leah had been someone who looked like she wouldn’t hurt a fly even if it bit her. This one... felt different. Was different.

Leah reached up, drawing her mask from her face, wadding it up, and throwing it into the bin next to the door. She turned towards the nurses, holstering the gun. “Go inside, lock the door, and hide. You’re the second biggest target in the camp, outside of the storeroom.”

And the storeroom had guns, Taylor remembered.

The nurses began filing towards the door, swiping masks as they went or putting theirs back over their faces. Leah turned to her, nodding once as she began to walk back down the hallway towards the chapel, Taylor starting up after her, Aiden stumbling a bit behind her as they went.

“Are you going out there?” she found herself asking, not sure what she wanted to hear.

Leah glanced back at her, inclining her head. “Gonna have to, I’m afraid.”

“There’s nobody else? Shouldn’t we have some cops or something?”

Leah hesitated, then breathed in a long, weary breath. “The police, after Leviathan, were all recalled to the Downtown to secure it, and they took all of their gear - guns and all - with them,” she explained, voice utterly flat. “ _Most_ parts of the city that aren’t the Downtown, such as the Commercial District and, in our case, Docks South, have zero police presence. Officer Atkinson only ever remained here as a favour.”

“To who?”

Leah’s face twisted, glancing away from her. “For me,” she supplied neutrally. “I was a family friend of theirs, and when I was put in charge of this shelter I asked if he could come here with his daughter instead of pulling back with the rest of the police force, so we could have some better protection.”

Oh. Officer Atkinson had come here at her request, and... now he and his daughter were sick.

Leah must’ve been following a similar line of thought to her, as she grimaced and glanced away, a guilty twist to her face. “Because the shelter is so new, we haven’t had the time to set up a militia or anything like it. Even if we had, the gangs currently have a monopoly on guns in the area, and at best we have three or four. Most shelters are sitting ducks, and the gangs are starting to realize it.”

“But _why?_ ” she insisted, not sure what she was really expecting out of this. “Why can the police just step away like that? Refuse to protect us? This is a crisis regardless of whether or not we’re being attacked. It’s their job!”

That earned her another sigh, Leah tilting her head back. “It was decided a long, long time ago that the police weren’t legally obligated to protect you, Taylor. Cities hit by Endbringers tend to be really dangerous, and the BBPD made the decision to ensure the safety of the force by pulling back to a defensive position.”

“Then why not at least bring the camp inside?” She pressed, picking up her pace, Aiden’s footsteps stomping away behind her. “It’d at least be safer for all of us.”

Leah was already shaking her head before she could finish. “Not enough room, Taylor, and they have their own—”

“There _is_ enough room,” she cut in, unable to help herself. Her voice came forced, and she felt _angry_ again, betrayed. Leah should _know_ this. “The church is barely full as-is, we have other wings, we can—”

“Enough,” Leah interrupted, voice sharp. “If we pack four-hundred people inside of this church, Taylor, and they get inside? It turns into a slaughter, not to mention the trampling that’ll happen. It’s not safer in here than it is out there for the people in the camp.”

She could remember how it felt to be packed inside, how they didn’t listen, how she was...

No.

She shook the thoughts away, refocused on the present. They were arriving at the chapel, Leah slowing her pace as they reached the threshold. The chapel had been rapidly and sloppily reinforced, tables pushed up into barricades, chairs flipped so that they balanced the seat and back against the ground, leaving the four legs sticking up in the air like impromptu, massive caltrops. The people inside were huddled, pulling away into groups, huddling amongst each other.

Leah turned back to her, reaching into her pocket. From it, she retrieved a large fold-out knife, a little larger than she thought something like a pocket knife reasonably should be, and shoved the thing into her free hand, closing Taylor’s fingers around it so she was gripping it herself.

Taylor met her eyes, uncertain. She didn’t know what to feel.

“You cannot let them corner you if things get bad,” Leah said. There was something intense about her words, the way she was staring at her. “Use lethal force, go for the eyes, the throat, even the balls—but don’t let them corner you. Don’t let them pin you. Promise me, Taylor, that you’ll use this if it comes down to it.”

She swallowed, throat suddenly dry again. “I promise,” she said, the words slipping out with almost sickening ease, doubly so because she _believed_ them. She had just promised to slit a man’s throat if it came down to it, and she hadn’t been lying, not if it meant protecting herself and her own.

Leah released her hand, stepping away a few paces. “People with too much power and who fear none of the consequences will make victims out of people,” she said, flat. “I’ve been out of the military for nearly four years now, I’m not registered to use this gun, but I’m going to have to go out there and try to get them to leave.”

But they weren’t _going_ to. It was a futile task, she was going to get beaten or killed or _worse_. “There’s ten of them,” she tried, instead, rather than arguing her chances.

“I know the threat a gun can carry,” Leah said, unholstering it from her hip. “It might be enough.”

Nothing about her expression said she believed that. If anything, it said the opposite.

“I got that knife during one of my tours, it kept me safe, and now it’s yours. I need you to stay here, okay?” Leah said, her voice pitching into a shout as she turned away. “Don’t try to help.”

Then she was turning away, moving towards the doors in half of a jog.

Leah was gone, and she knew she couldn’t just sit here and do nothing.

Taylor reached _out_ , out as far as her control would let her. The world lit itself up, motes of information flickering into view, the range of her power wavering at the edges, inching larger, new motes picked up at the far periphery.

She started pulling them all in.

“Everyone!” Leah shouted from near the door. “I’m going out to confront them before things can get _bad_ , I need you to hold this place down! Remain safe!”

Her power was indiscriminate. She wanted an army, and it gave it to her. She didn’t bother to check which rats were the bad ones, or which were the good ones. She just dragged them all in, a swarm larger than she’d ever really tried to control before. There was no resistance to it, not in the way there was when she tried to manage multiple swarms at once. Did she even have an upper limit to how many things she could control at once, when she was handling them as one uniform whole?

She didn’t know.

Some of her rodents had already arrived near the church, and she quickly split them from the main swarm, forming a second. She reached out to her power, widened the stream of information until she saw and heard and smelled all that they did. The senses were the same too-sharp as they always were, almost overwhelming her with the smell of wet, cold earth, the sound of a vehicle pricking at the edges of her awareness as it trundled ever-closer.

She watched Leah approach the stairs, a giant figure obscured by stalks of grass and drowned flowers, her long strides leading her down to where the main gravel road led towards the camp’s center. She urged her rodents closer, out from the brush, as Leah fell briefly out of sight. When she next spotted her, Leah had situated herself next to a table that had been abandoned in the panicked rush, one of the heavy metal ones with folding legs, and was pushing it over onto its side to make some cover.

There was a tug on _her_ hand, on her body. Her sight swam unevenly as she was abruptly reminded she had a body, and things she had to do with it. It almost felt foreign to her own senses, like she'd dove too deep into her rodents and had at some point become more comfortable with their bodies than her own. She blinked, looked with her _own_ eyes as Aiden tugged, insistent, towards the barricades. She felt her focus almost... _stretch_ , senses playing alongside one another, harder to decipher at once but... doable. It was hard not to focus overly on one of them, but she’d clearly have to learn someday if she didn’t want to be standing around like an idiot if she did anything more than draw up a swarm.

Letting herself be led further in, she caught sight of Cleo, huddled behind an overturned oak desk. Some of the boys were there too, and caught sight of them as she started to approach, nudging Cleo, who waved them over.

The sound of the truck drew part of her focus back to the world outside, blinking with a new set of eyes as she watched the truck skid to an ungraceful stop on the gravel road.

“You guys don’t have to do this!” Leah’s voice cut in. She watched as Leah ducked behind the table, her gun raised.

The guys in the truck _laughed_ as they heard her, nothing about it kind or happy. They hopped off the back of the truck in pairs, brandishing their weapons, snickering between each other. The driver of the truck shoved the door open, a thin, short man with a fairly severe overbite, and stepped out, holding a shotgun by its barrel.

She surveyed the rest. Two others had handguns, while the rest were brandishing various metal implements. One of them had a crowbar, a few others had bats, and one even had a metal wrench that smelled of blood.

Taylor lowered herself down with Aiden, braced her back against the barricade as he clambered into her lap, tucked himself against her front determinedly. She wrapped both of her arms around him, pulled him in close and felt the way he trembled against her. She tucked her nose into his hair and hugged him tighter all the same. Cleo was biting her lower lip, peeking over the edge of the barricade as she glanced towards the front of the chapel, clearly worried.

She dove back into her rodents, no longer needing to keep herself centred on her body.

“You were so proud of turning us away!” one of them bellowed, cracking his bat against the gravel beneath his feet.

“We were just looking for supplies, after all!” another jeered, cocky. “What’s so bad about that? And, hell, your _little friend_ in the force ain’t around, as far as I can tell!”

“Clearly he’s too fucking afraid to face us!”

“He should be!” a new voice shouted, incensed. “The fucker at the gate was a real pushover, wasn't he?!”

Cheers roared out from the group as they fanned out like a pack of dogs, spreading across the road as they started to approach where Leah had entrenched herself.

“We just want some food!”

“Don’t listen to that fat motherfucker, we’re here for your booze!”

Laughter, sharp and caustic.

“And your drugs!”

“And your girls!”

Her swarm had grown by magnitudes, bristling against the edges of her awareness, each new body added to the whole making it that much harder to ignore. It was larger than she’d ever let a swarm become, so many bodies crammed together, tucked around the church, hidden in the tall grass and in cracks in the foundation.

She could remember what she saw, back at the infirmary. People huddling, hiding.

Little girls.

“ _You cannot let them corner you if things get bad._ ” The warning rang in her head like a church bell.

“You’re not getting _any_ of that!” Leah barked back, firm. She rose slightly from behind the cover, levelling her gun towards the one with the shotgun. “You’re going to _leave_ unless you want things to get worse for everyone involved!”

That earned her more jeering mockery, a riot of voices, too many to decipher. The group splintered almost in response to her threat, a handful of them - maybe three at most - breaking away, turning towards where the camp started. Towards where the civilians were, the children and—

Leah's hand wavered, unwilling to draw away from the main threat, but clearly desperate to stop the ones approaching the tents.

The guy nearest the tent line broke into a half-jog, whipped his arm back, and swung his weapon with all of his force into the tent nearest to him, his blow landing where the spines stretched the fabric. The bat hit the spine, shattered it, and screaming broke out from inside as it collapsed on top of its occupants.

But they didn't stop there. The other two rushed past the one who had just attacked the tent, whipping their own weapons into the ones around them in a similar fashion. Most of them broke and fell, unoccupied, but not all of them, screaming breaking out and then spreading like a wildfire as panic surged and overtook those who were hiding.

The one who had attacked first lunged forward, drove his hand through the opening of the collapsed tent, grabbing hold of someone. The screaming picked up in pitch and in desperation as he pulled a child from inside, gripping them by a thin, scrawny arm.

Leah's aim drifted, and finally jumped to the three assaulting the tents themselves, and that was when the others made their move.

The main group lunged forward as one, charging with a burst of laughter.

Leah swivelled, kicking up gravel, and fired directly into the group, a crack of force and noise. One of them dropped with a scream, clutching at his leg, but the others surged over him, quickly closing ground, intent on mobbing her.

Taylor _shoved_ , and the true scope of her swarm only really then became clear. She had been reaching out to everything under her control, anything she could sink fingers into, and it showed. Small bodies _foamed_ as they poured out of the cracks and crevices where they’d been hiding, crawling over the ground and each other in a thick chittering carpet. They swept forward, moving fast, reaching the lip of the hill, just near the stairs, where they were still out of sight—

The guy with the shotgun fired at Leah.

The blast missed and instead shattered one of the church’s windows. Screams erupted around her, human voices blending with the wail of her rodents. Aiden flinched, kicked at the ground, and she tucked him in even closer, curling around him as she pushed her rodents on.

The shotgun guy was the first to notice her swarm as they spilled towards him. His face went from triumph to horror, quickly stumbling backwards and letting out a shout. Leah turned too, jerking away from the frothing mass of small bodies, pulling herself flush against the barricade. Taylor parted the swarm for her, had them scramble down the stairs and around Leah, instead surging up and over the attacking group like a cresting wave.

They didn’t have a chance to run.

She threw the swarm sloppily at anyone who was in the way. They crawled onto them, and she told them to _grab_ , to bite, to claw. Her swarm easily washed over the one with the shotgun first, a mental direction guiding her rats to gnaw at his hands, trying to get the gun free—

And instead, one of the rats - _the bad ones_ , her mind supplied - sheared through his flesh like warm butter, teeth lodged into the bone. A hysterical thought entered her head, pointing out that in no way should rats with rabies be able to do that, but she didn’t have the time to think about it.

He dropped the gun with a scream, and the rats continued.

They jumped on the rest, collecting on their skin, clinging to their clothes. The bad rats were much stronger, unusually so, biting into flesh and stripping it away like vultures or other carrion birds.

But they weren't carrion birds. Not vultures or crows, because those birds went after the dead, and nothing dead screamed the way they did. It all mixed together, the wail of her swarm, the screams in the church, and the screams outside; a chorus of nails-on-chalkboard.

Still, she didn't stop.

The group below turned on her rats, started taking swings at them. One emptied what sounded like an entire clip of handgun ammunition into the swarm. Motes of information blinked out, but there were always more of them to replace the ones that died. Others attempted to bludgeon them, swinging bats and taking out three, four, five at a time.

It still wasn’t enough, her rats rolled over all of them.

The three who had been pillaging the tents turned, frozen when they saw the oncoming wave, and began to run, sprinting towards the truck. The line broke dramatically after that, snowballing as the guy with the shotgun scrambled to his feet, grabbed his gun from the ground with the hand she hadn’t mutilated, and started running with the rest. Blood spilled as they ran, enough of it to paint the gravel a muddy-red, getting everywhere.

One of them paused just long enough to grab the guy Leah had shot, hauling him to his feet and shoving him back towards the truck. They clambered into it, throwing rats off of their bodies, and she let the ruse play out, guiding her rats away. She didn’t want to kill them, that’d make more problems than it would solve, but she did want to scare them. Wanted them to think they only escaped by the skin of their teeth.

The driver kicked the vehicle into gear as the last of them clambered onto the back, wheels skidding as they ripped around and drove back out, spraying gravel in the direction of the rats she’d sent scampering after them.

The vehicle slipped out of sight, and only then did Taylor feel safe enough to begin drawing them apart. Good or bad rats, she grabbed all but the ones she was using for her eyes and spread them out, telling them to leave. The swarm decohered at her command, draining back into the tall grass, fleeing back out into the city.

Cleo shook her arm, and it was enough to reorient her back to her own body. Cleo had gotten to her feet, and so had most of the boys around her, watching them with somewhat worried looks. The rest of the church was on their feet, already moving towards the front doors. Aiden was still tucked into her front, unwilling to let go. She could only imagine how _this_ was going to impact his sleeping schedule, between the crush of the bodies and the violence, it would be a miracle if he slept at all tonight.

Taylor eased one arm beneath Aiden, and one arm around him, easing him up so that he could press his face into the juncture of her neck. Cleo approached from the side, pulling away from the boys, and reached out with her own hand, an offer. She nodded towards her, and started getting up, Cleo taking hold of her left arm and tugging her to her feet.

The doors to the chapel flew open, and people began to move, pouring out of the building like a tide.

“C’mon,” Cleo said, stepping around her and Aiden, the boys following after her.

Shakily, she wandered after them, the crowd around her keeping pace as she went. Some still remained behind the barricades, though not many.

They stepped out into the outside world, the air humid and choking. Taylor took in a breath, let it out, and dismissed the remainder of her rodents, letting them scurry off back into the undergrowth.

The ground was littered with blood, most of it from the attackers, but a not-insignificant amount from the rodents she'd thrown at them. Furry bodies, mice, rats, even a few squirrels, were strewn across the ground, trampled and twisted into broken angles as they sluggishly bled out.

Leah was standing at the top of the stairs, looking tired and more than a little shocked. The ones who had been hiding in their tents had also emerged, crowding around to look up at where Leah was standing.

The noise from the crowd was uneasy, ripples of discontent echoing back and forth through the people below.

Leah turned back towards them, holstering her gun. “It’s over now!” she announced. “They’re gone!”

She clearly wasn't expecting the shouts of anger that came in response.

“They sent you out to die!” someone yelled, irate.

“Where’s all the people who are supposed to be protecting us?” another chimed in.

“They nearly got to us!” a woman’s voice cut in, shrill and terrified.

Leah pressed her fingers to her mouth, creating a shrill, harsh whistle that cut through the complaints being slung. Once the crowd quieted down, she let her hand drop. “We’re going to _fix_ this!” she started, nodding along to the murmurs of interest. “You’re right, we came way too close to being overrun by ten guys who think they deserve whatever they want! We didn’t have anyone to protect the camp, but that _changes_. I’m going to be taking people in to make a militia, some sort of group, and _today_!”

The crowd boomed, eager, at her words. What felt like a hundred or more voices simultaneously pledged themselves to help, people shuffling between others, trying to show how willing they were. So many people, incredibly eager to ensure something like this never happened again.

“But before then!” Leah continued, the crowd quieting. “Whoever the cape was that just helped us, _thank you_. I just want to ask if we could speak, one-on-one, in private? If you could help us keep this place safe, it would be really appreciated!”

The crowd rumbled, discontent.

“They can’t just be for the church’s protection!” someone yelled.

“We’ve had rat problems, why weren’t they helping?!”

Someone shouldered to the front of the crowd, someone she knew. Kurt’s face stared out among the uncertain, worried throng of people, looking straight at Leah. “The rats have been a huge problem!” he shouted, projecting his voice past the noise of the crowd. “People keep getting hurt, you can’t just keep this to yourself!”

Leah whistled again, harsh. “Of course if the cape came forward, we would have them working with _everybody_! The entire camp, not just the church.” She paused, waited for people to refocus on her. “And until that happens, we need to focus elsewhere! We need to get ourselves ready for the next time, with or without a cape, as this can’t happen again!”

That placated the crowd, voices ringing out again in support, eager to help. Requests, cheers, anything they could do to make sure the camp was safer.

But all she could think about was that it might still not be enough. Leah had control of them, but it seemed to be tenuous, slipping.

She felt like she wasn’t doing enough. Maybe they had been right, maybe she should’ve been spending more time forcing rats away, it was just... easy to forget about it. The control had to be consciously accessed. She just didn’t _use_ her powers that often, but if using them would make the place safer for everyone - for Aiden - and those outside? It probably couldn’t hurt to pitch in a little.

It might even help her train using them.

As much as this was a victory, it was only a victory because of her intervention, because she hadn't held back. It wasn't going to stay a victory at this rate, either. Those types of people would be back, there was no arguing that. She didn’t know the exact particulars of the Empire’s current situation, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine that next time they’ll bring capes, since the camp had at least one themselves.

She tightened her grip around Aiden, felt him nose quietly at her neck, breathing easing out.

She had to complete her goggles, and go to Leah, and _soon_.


	7. Containment 1.7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [Lyrisey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrisey/pseuds/lyrisey) for betaing and dealing with my constant forgetfulness!

Leah sat across from her, back to the windows. She looked tired, dead on her feet, with dark bruises beneath each eye, yet nevertheless perched at the edge of her chair, impatient. The light that filtered in through the windows behind her, in a better situation, might’ve given a glow to her skin, but rather than that, it just emphasized the weakness in her body, the way her skin was a little too translucent, emphasizing where shadows cast into the lines drawn across her face.

Aiden pressed into Taylor’s side, quiet and reclusive. He hadn’t spoken in the last twenty-four hours, not since the last attack, withdrawing into himself and refusing to let her get out of sight.

Marlon and Edith were sick. She and Cleo had woken up that morning to the sound of them coughing, sobbing out barely-coherent complaints that they felt sick, that it _hurt_. They’d called in the nurses not long after, which had drawn Leah’s attention.

Cleo had been directed to go and do her job, whereas she had been given the morning off, and was now waiting with Leah outside of the infirmary.

Marlon and Edith weren't the only ones who had fallen sick, either. Enough people were sick that the infirmary was refusing visitors, saying there was too much risk, and they needed space for beds. Even if she hadn't been told as much, the smell would've clued her into the dire state of things. Beneath all the antiseptic and rubbing alcohol, something was growing in strength, penetrating even through the closed door: the sickly-sweet smell of something gone so overripe it was close to rotting, combined with the stench of pus and infected wounds.

Between the overcast gloom, the exhaustion she felt, and with everything that had happened today, it didn't feel like it was barely noon. It felt the opposite, like she was hours away from slipping into bed. It felt like things were becoming cyclical, getting increasingly worse, and she could do nothing about it.

Taylor looked up as the door rattled and started to open. Leah jerked from her seat as a man in full PPE with salt-and-pepper hair stepped through, the smell surrounding him so bad that Taylor wanted to gag.

The man - Dr. Wright, the person Leah had called in - closed the door behind him, cutting off the worst of the smell, and reached up to pull his mask off.

“I have no idea what’s causing this.”

Leah tottered, nearly stumbled, as though she’d been struck. “Do you have anything?” she pleaded, her voice thin and wavering. The guilt was there, the same guilt she’d seen the day before.

Dr. Wright sighed, beginning to peel his gloves off. “In this case, the normal answer would be parasites, something I’m not yet willing to entirely dismiss. Parasites and waterborne illnesses in general are incredibly common after Leviathan, and more generally Endbringers - and the traumatic shock they tend to cause people - leave people’s immune systems and a city’s filtration systems and infrastructure vulnerable to the spread of parasites and disease.”

“But?” Leah pressed.

“ _But_ , if this was a parasite, I’d expect to see a much larger scattershot for infection,” he explained, voice plain. “While it’s true that everyone in there has mostly been drinking from the same sources and eating the same thing, it seems to be transmissible between people. The symptoms themselves are fairly generic—a cough, high fever, nausea, not uncommon among things like influenza strains. It’s very possible this could be an out-of-country disease, as Endbringer fights are worldwide efforts, and if someone happens to die while infected, the disease can easily spread if it can sustain itself, especially in water. Not to mention this isn't unique to this camp; my colleagues have been mentioning similar symptoms across the city.

“That said, if it _was_ influenza, I would expect it to have worked its way out of their systems already, whether that meant death or their symptoms finally subsiding. Combined with that, there are symptoms that _are_ unusual; the smell, for starters, as well as extreme intestinal distress, not to mention the inflamed wounds and bloodshot eyes.” He paused, dropping his gloves into the bin. “If not for how it’s spreading, I’d say this was a parasite, it might explain the more odd symptoms, but it doesn’t seem to be one. You said the latest patients, Marlon and Edith, had been the ones to carry Piper’s things to the infirmary, and had visited her a few times?”

Leah nodded. “They visited her yesterday, once before the attack, and once after.”

“Do you have a sanitization policy?” Dr. Wright inquired.

“For now we’ve been burning their blankets, just to be safe,” Leah explained.

He nodded. “Keep that up, for now. It’s your best bet to curb the spread. Outside of that, there can’t be any more interaction with patients unless someone is in full PPE. That includes the nurses, who I can tell are missing a few articles.”

“We... might not have enough,” Leah said again, voice hesitant.

“About that, actually,” Dr. Wright piped up, changing topics. “Was the quarantine that’s been set up outside established after you ran out of space? The situation outside seems worse than in here.”

“They actually came to me just this morning,” Leah explained. “A number of people fell sick last night in the camp, and as they couldn’t reach us, they decided to go ahead and establish a quarantine without first asking me. They’ve been keeping me updated on it, but you’re right, it is bad out there, and we need more aid, but we don’t have the staff to do it. The infirmary is already packed, and there’s not many other rooms big enough to begin moving people inside.”

“You should really call in some of my colleagues to look it over,” he suggested.

“We really don’t have the money,” was Leah’s reply, flat. “We can’t afford them, or the extra equipment, as of right now, and our request for more has been delayed because of problems Downtown.”

Dr. Wright grimaced, nodding along. “The protests about the militarized zone, that would be an issue, yes.” His face furrowed, and he looked contemplative. “Look, I’ll see what I can do to get something sent this way, whether a few more doctors or some additional equipment. No promises, but I know a few colleagues who might be able to help out without an overhead cost, or at least not a particularly large one.”

Leah’s face relaxed and she leaned forward, taking his hand. “Thank you so much, that would be really helpful.”

Dr. Wright shook it, smiling awkwardly. “It’s my job, Miss Hampton. We all have them.” Pulling away from her, he fished a hand into his pocket, drawing out a card and handing it over to Leah. “I still need to make my rounds up north, so I’ll be going, but keep in touch. I'll be looking into what this disease may be, in the meantime.”

“I will.”

With that, Dr. Wright turned, grabbing his bag from the table where the masks normally were, and made his way back down the hallway.

Once he had slipped out of sight, Leah started pacing back and forth like a cornered animal. She reached up, dragging fingers through her hair, her face twisted up in frustration, looking harried.

Taylor watched Leah come just shy of falling apart as she walked back and forth, hissing something under her breath that she couldn't make out. Aiden shied away from Leah, tugged on Taylor's sleeve, indicating he wanted to leave.

She glanced his way and shook her head. He squirmed, unhappy, but opted to stuff his face into her arm in the absence of a potential escape route.

Her eyes flicked, met Taylor’s, and the frantic edge to it softened. Leah’s hands fell from her hair, and she let out a tired, weary sigh.

“You can have the rest of the day off, Taylor,” Leah said, her voice a little hoarse. “I’ll get someone to fill in for you.”

She had no real idea what to feel about that. On the one hand, it burned not being helpful—she was stuck doing nothing as the world burned down around her, and it was genuinely anyone’s guess if the nazis or the plague would get to them first.

She had to be doing _something_ —had to at least be a little productive, get things done.

But... she could tinker, couldn’t she? She could complete her goggles today, if she could just find the parts.

Looking at Leah, she knew there was no arguing it. This wasn’t a ‘you can help if you want to’ situation, this was Leah deciding all of this was bad enough that she deserved a day off. Maybe she would’ve gotten more done, working the kitchen, maybe she wouldn’t’ve, but she didn’t have a choice.

Nudging Aiden, she started getting to her feet. “Alright,” she said, keeping her voice quiet. Aiden shuffled down from the seat, feet landing on the ground, reaching up and making a grabby motion with his hand. She took it, wiggled it a little, and he smiled. “I’ll just be in my room, okay?”

It was where she’d hidden her goggles, after all.

Leah looked at her, mouth twisted into a downward slant. “Be safe.”

* * *

Pushing the door to her room open, Taylor stared into the almost unfamiliar interior.

Cleo was predictably absent, still doing her chores with the rest of the church. It still rankled somewhat that Leah had decided to take her off rotation for the day, that she’d been given a softer approach. If anything, Cleo had been significantly more torn up about Marlon and Edith getting sick than _she_ was, and Cleo had still been forced to go to work.

Was it because she had Aiden? That felt too simple.

She shook the thought away. It was pointless, it wasn’t like Leah would’ve let her anyway.

The room was barren, nowadays. There were vacancies where people used to be, beds and all taken up to the infirmary, and leaving obvious gaps in their wake. Neither she nor Cleo decorated; she didn't really see the point in doing so, and Cleo seemed to agree with that assessment. This wasn't their home, and they weren't obligated to make it look like one. It left the room feeling like nobody really used it: it was too tidy, too empty, without individuality, reminding her of a guest bedroom. Put together and ready for someone to sleep in, sure, but not something someone actually occupied.

Aiden relinquished her hand, toddling past as he made his way towards the bed.

Taylor shook the thoughts away, mentally kicking herself for getting lost again. She closed the door behind her as she entered. Aiden was already grabbing his cherry-red backpack from by the bed and hopping up onto it, shoes and all. He sat himself down so his legs dangled off the edge of the mattress, unzipping his bag and reaching inside.

She fished her own backpack off the ground as she arrived at the bed, settling herself down next to Aiden. She pulled it open, and found her goggles staring back up at her from between the zipper's teeth.

They needed to be completed, and very soon. Even if the sickness didn’t kill people, it would certainly leave them weak, and the rest of them vulnerable. If it spread far enough, they’d be easy pickings for the guys from before, and this time around they were unlikely to make a show of it. She escalated the situation, and justifiably so, they were going to do unspeakable things to people in the camp, she couldn’t just _let it happen_ , but... she’d turned it into a conflict. One with capes.

She couldn’t fix Marlon, couldn’t fix any of them, not Edith, Piper or Officer Atkinson. She had no control over it. People were doing all they could, she knew that, and now she had to do the same.

But she needed _parts_. Copper, sheet metal, not much, but... enough to bodge it together.

A phone at this point would be an _invaluable_ miracle, nearly perfect. It’d have just about everything inside of it that she’d need, especially if it was one of those newer smartphones. She could even cannibalize the battery instead of having to put one together on her own, but she just... didn’t have one. The stuff in the boiler room was no good either, just ceramics, plastics and some loose pipe metal. The church itself didn’t have much she could really work with.

...But, then, did she need to stay inside of the church? Or even the camp?

Her mind refocused. The transformer, she remembered, downed on the roof of that 7-11. What she was about to do was magnitudes of illegal, but it felt utterly necessary at this point, and she couldn’t think of a better source of copper or sheet metal that didn’t involve stealing from someone other than the government.

That and it wasn't like there were cops there to stop her in the first place. If they actually cared about protecting people, they'd be around to stop her, and she wasn't putting bets on that being the case.

Without really thinking about it, she started to empty her bag. Article-by-article, she shoved them away on the bedside table and hid them underneath the bed itself. If Cleo saw all of her things out, she might ask questions or get suspicious, and she wasn't really in a place to deal with that right now.

Once her bag was emptied of all but the goggles and the tools she’d forgotten to give back the last time, she looked back up, finding Aiden with his nose nearly buried in the open cover of Owl Moon. They were almost certainly going to have to sign it out again, or at least ask for an extension in the next few days, weren't they? It had become his favourite by no small margin, and he wasn't very subtle about it.

Hopefully, she could get him to go along with this. It might do him some good, getting away from the camp too. Maybe he’d brighten up a bit, which would certainly be nice.

“Would you like to go outside with me, Aiden?”

He turned to look at her, blinking owlishly. The words took a moment to click, but when they did, his expression started to look interested, eager.

“An adventure,” she explained, because she wasn’t sure how else to explain to him that she was about to go and break a fair number of laws for some raw copper.

He started nodding, bobbleheaded.

“I’ll even show you the birds on the way over, too.”

That, evidently, cinched it.

Abandoning his book back next to his bag, he turned around, flopping forward to look at her. He breathed in, blinked slowly, and then nuzzled his head into the bed in some sort of nod. “‘Kay,” he mumbled, the first time she’d heard his voice in a while.

She leaned over and ran her fingers through tangled ginger locks, feeling him soothe beneath her touch.

“But if you wanna go out there, we gotta get you ready, alright?” Taylor murmured, soft.

Aiden bobbed his head as he nodded again.

Getting Aiden ready didn’t take long after that. It mostly amounted to her fishing his rain jacket out from their trunk, packing some of his things away in his backpack, and getting said backpack onto the boy himself.

For her own side of things, she just slipped back into her father’s jacket, taking in the faint, fading smell of her dad. She missed him, wanted to make more time to go to the grave she made him, but not unjustifiably, she just... didn’t have the time. Especially when it would involve taking Aiden fairly out of the way to get where she wanted to go.

She didn’t let them linger, not long enough that it might dissuade her from doing what she was about to. They were out of the room and moving at a brisk pace towards the chapel a few minutes later, Aiden surprisingly not taking her hand, and instead just walking next to her.

There were people in the chapel, but not many. News of the sickness had gotten around, and the people inside were keeping their distance from each other. Things were still getting done, and she could see people working on plans, a map for the camp, but it was all staggered and hesitant.

She passed them by, pushing out through the front door.

It had cleared up more today, leaving the sky the bluest it had been in over a week. There were still enough clouds sitting on the horizon that she knew it probably wouldn’t last, but for the time being, the sun shone overhead, peeking through the cracks in the cloud layer.

Not to say that the day was totally clear. There was a foggy mist that hung low to the ground; not so bad as to block her sight, but thick enough that it gave distant things a bit of a milky quality to them, and made the streets just a little more gloomy.

Ushering Aiden out through the door, she descended the stairs leading into the church and started across the flat stretch of dirt towards the second set of stairs that led down into the camp proper. As she grew closer, and the lip of the hill pulled increasingly out of her line of sight, she saw them.

Tents, with red Xs spray-painted onto their sides. The tents with the markings were clustered together in places, four or five in a bunch, and were scattered around the perimeter of the church, almost forming a complete ring around it.

She slowed to a crawl as she reached the top of the stairs, hesitating.

She hadn’t thought it would be this bad. Leah had mentioned it offhandedly before Dr. Wright arrived, and Dr. Wright himself commented on it, clearing up some things, but not enough. This was... bad, she could count at least two-dozen tents with red Xs just in her line of sight. She didn’t know if the same could be said for other parts of the camp, the ones blocked off by the church, but if there was even just _one_ person in each of those tents, it was still a lot of people who had gotten sick.

She had her doubts it was just one person per tent, too. If the infirmary was prohibiting access because there were too many sick, how bad was it getting out here?

Using the top of the stairs as a vantage point, Taylor scanned across the arrayed tents, eventually finding a small path where the red Xs fell away, leaving just enough room to squeeze through. She descended, reaching out to take Aiden's hand of her own impetus, needing that reassurance. She passed onto the gravel road from the stairs, and started circling around towards where she'd seen the open path.

As she got closer, the smell from the infirmary came back, and in full force. Without the antiseptic and rubbing alcohol, she knew where she’d smelled it before too. The big tent had smelled faintly of it, she recalled, not as intense as the infirmary had smelled, but strong enough that it had stuck with her.

She heard the buzzing as they grew closer, saw the flies that clung to the grass and tents, their large black bodies swarming around the tents with the red Xs.

She pulled Aiden in as close as she could manage, and started walking, trying to keep her distance from the marked tents. She made her way through the camp, heading for the gate.

“Where are you headed?”

The voice startled her, made her jerk, her head whipping around to catch sight of a guy with ginger hair and a thick beard climb out from a flap of his tent, looking at her inquisitively. His voice was cautiously polite, and so was his face, but she couldn’t tell if that was hostility or if someone was trying to be genuinely helpful.

Still, she could try to avoid it becoming the latter. “We’re going out for a walk,” she supplied, wiggling her and Aiden’s hand. “Getting some fresh air.”

The guy’s face grew a bit worried, and he stepped more carefully out into the grass, right in front of her. “It might not be safe to go out right now, people are falling sick in droves.” He hesitated, looking closely at her for a few seconds. “Have you heard anything about the rat cape? Do you know if Leah knows?”

Her mouth went dry, and she felt herself grow a bit wary. She wasn't ready to deal with this yet. There was too much risk that she'd give something away, something big enough that he could put two-and-two together, figure out she had powers. “I’ll ask Leah about it,” she tried, instead. Hopefully, by the time she would have to, she’d have her goggles ready anyway. “But I don’t have much authority.”

This morning had proved that much.

“Well, you have more than we do,” the guy responded, a bit glib. It still wasn’t hostile, but there was certainly a bitter note in his voice.

Frustration bubbled into focus, her chest tightening unpleasantly. She was what they needed, but she was also Leah’s... gopher, it felt like, at times. The one that hangs around her, the one who should have answers. They viewed her differently, as someone with a different status.

But she didn’t have any answers. She never did.

She had to do this, though. She had to finish her goggles, if she just did that, she could start getting somewhere. Breathing in, she shrugged. “Sorry, I’ll try my best. I still think Aiden here could do with a bit of fresh air, away from all of this.”

The guy’s eyes lowered to Aiden, and for a second she felt herself bristle. Except, instead of any hostility or intrigue, his face creased into a warm smile. Aiden, in response, moved to tuck himself behind her leg, a glimpse of his face revealing wariness.

“Yeah, you probably have that right,” he conceded, rolling his shoulders up in a shrug. “If you’d like, I could lead you to the south gate?”

“I was actually heading north,” Taylor explained, looking at him.

He pursed his lips, glancing over her shoulder. “It's much worse in the north end of the camp,” he said, catching her eye again. “Your best bet is to probably circle back around, instead of trying to arrive at that gate directly.”

It was hard to imagine that things could get much worse, honestly, but she had no reason to suspect he was lying. She nodded, and watched as the guy turned, waving her forward as he led them on a route through tents full of sick people.

As she took in her surroundings, she realized that the camp was empty in a way it had never really been before. There weren't as many people, only a handful of stragglers standing around, watching from a distance, keeping to their little groups. Before, movement around this part of the camp had been like a river, people moving, blending together, waving and greeting. Now, all the water had gone stagnant and still, choked off. People didn't wave, they kept their distance, and didn't make a sound as they watched them pass.

As she grew closer to the gate, more people started to emerge. Faces she could recognize, acquaintances and people she'd seen in passing. The woman with the dusky skin from the day before, who had been managing the big tent; a man from back when she'd been living in the camp herself, who had served her stew on her first evening there. Most of them were wearing bags, carrying luggage, some of them even with weapons, and she realized that they were leaving.

“Ah,” the ginger guy vocalized as he looked at what had caught her eye. “Yeah, people are leaving. Afraid of the sickness and nazis, mostly. They’re heading towards Downtown and trying to get into the shelters, where most of the PRT and cops have set up shop.”

She glanced back towards them, some of the groups now looking at her. They were speaking among themselves, questions passed back and forth as they looked between her and the ginger guy.

“I’ve heard some rumours they’re turning people away down there,” the man supplied, quietly. “It’s why I’m not going myself, I would, if I could trust that they would have a place for me, and I wouldn’t be at gunpoint while cops scream at me or something.”

She gave them a closer look. Most of the people who had packed up to leave looked tired, weary, barely held together. Clothes with holes, only some of them patched, skin that had gone pale and ashen. A woman was carrying a pair of twins, barely managing to keep up, another woman next to her helping to alleviate some of the weight.

Things were getting worse. They might not be bad yet, but if people were already this desperate, it wasn’t exactly a huge leap to imagine what might happen if things continued down this path. Civility might still be a thing now, but in a week? She didn’t know.

The camp was shedding numbers, and they couldn’t do much to halt the process.

She should’ve been doing more, protecting more people. She should’ve attacked the guys in the vehicle before they’d driven right up into the middle of the camp to terrify people, driven them off _there_ , instead of letting something like this stew.

But she hadn’t.

Breathing out, she turned to look at the guy who had led her here, who was observing her with a distant, but empathizing sort of look. “Thank you,” she said, quiet.

He shook his head, waved her off. “We’re all human, kid,” he said, and she rankled a bit under the ‘kid’. “I can’t fault you for this, none of us can. If you need any help like this again, ask for Carlson.” He paused, awkward. “That’s, uh, my name.”

She got that much.

“Just come back through the same entrance when you get back, the other ones are all messier than this,” Carlson explained, stepping back.

Taylor turned away from him, down to Aiden. “You ready to go?”

He nodded, resolute.

So they did.

* * *

The 7-11 was entirely unchanged from the last time she’d been around. The area was still almost entirely abandoned, with the transformer still left on the rooftop, half-attached to a splintered piece of wooden pole. They were a few feet away, closer than they’d gotten the first time around, making it a bit hard to see the entirety of the transformer from where she stood.

Reaching it wasn’t exactly hard, but it was a matter of subtlety. She could, without question, teleport up there from where she stood, but she didn’t really want to broadcast to anyone who might be on the street that she had powers. Not until she had some way of concealing her identity, anyway.

Tugging on Aiden’s hand, she led him around, stepping off the ruined street and onto soaked grass. They passed by the side of the building, down where grass had been trampled down into dirt, and then turned into mud from the rain. The transformer fell out of view as they passed under the squarish overhanging roof.

The area behind the 7-11 was fairly barren. There was the black wall of the building, unpainted concrete with a single door and a set of concrete steps leading down from it. There was some space there, where a set of large trash bins had been left, and a rusted chainlink fence hemming the entire thing in, cutting it off from the yards of the other houses nearby.

She let go of Aiden’s hand, stepping back until she could just see the tip of the roof, her back pressing against the fence. “I need you to stay down here for now, okay?”

Aiden stared at her, imploringly and more than a little anxious, but he visibly rallied his courage and, finally, managed a nod. His eyes didn't linger on her for too long, drawn towards the roof, to where he'd seen her looking ever since the 7-11 had first come into view. “You gonna climb?” he asked, voice whisper-quiet.

She leaned down, pointing up towards where she could barely get line of sight on the roof’s surface. “Watch this edge, okay?”

He looked at her as though she'd grown another head, but nonetheless nodded his assent.

Moving away, she reached out, locked her sight on the target, and took a _step_.

Down below her, Aiden gasped.

Her feet met the roof, a dull thud the only indication that she had actually moved. She dropped into a crouch, glancing behind her to see Aiden staring back, a little awed, but in good spirits.

She reached up, pressed a finger to her lips.

He nodded rapidly, eyes owlish and full of excitement.

Creeping forward, she kept low, hiding herself from anyone who might see her from the street. As she got closer, she fished her arms out of the straps of her backpack, bringing it around to her side.

Arriving at the transformer, she reached out to it, pressed her fingers into the cold, damp metal of its exterior. Her power, normally more than happy to play along with her interests in machinery, gave her nearly nothing. She could pick out the nuts and washers, where she’d have to start pulling it apart, but otherwise she was getting absolutely nothing.

Which, well, wasn’t really surprising. She brought her bag down next to her, pulled the top open, and started retrieving her tools, placing them next to where her knee met the ground. She didn’t exactly know _how_ transformers worked, but it didn’t entirely surprise her they weren’t mechanical. Her power might like things like locks, which had many moving parts, but it was a picky sort of thing.

She oriented herself with what she did get out of it, though, getting a better grasp on where the parts intersected. This held that together, and that held this. Simple enough. She had no idea what she’d find inside of it once she dismantled it, but if there was copper, she was fairly sure she’d be able to cope.

She started with the lid, pulling away the odd, bumpy protrusion on the top with some wire still attached to it, revealing a copper rod of some kind. Next, she got the nuts and washers off of the ones holding the lid down itself, fit the head of her screwdriver beneath the little crack in the lid, and popped it open.

She stared down at the contents.

...Was that mineral oil?

Her power was completely unhelpful in proving it one way or another.

Whatever.

She was going to have to drain it then, which was a problem considering the thing was still attached to a chunk of heavy wood by a set of bolts and metal arms. She wasn’t about to get it off normally, not unless she wanted to spend the next couple of hours threading each bolt in a painful extraction process which would be a huge waste of time.

Instead, she grabbed her hammer, flipped her screwdriver around, and started chiselling away at the soft, waterlogged wood around the bolts with precise strikes.

A few more hard, pointed jabs, and the wood could no longer support the weight of the transformer. It creaked, tearing away from the greater mass, and Taylor stumbled forward to grab hold of the transformer before it could upend itself all over the roof and, perhaps more practically, herself.

Wobbling with easily thirty or forty pounds of what she was fairly certain was mineral oil, she shuffled over to the lip of the roof and promptly poured the entire thing out, watching it splash down on the ground below.

Now that her load was significantly lighter, and she could now actually see the insides, she could confidently say she hit something close to the motherload. There was, by far, more than enough copper tucked away in here, and she could easily repurpose the outer metal shell without much hassle. This was, blessedly, all she needed for the time being.

Once she got her tools back in her backpack, and said backpack on her back, she carried it back to where she’d teleported up to, Aiden staring up at her as she came back into view. His face was worried, but curiosity seemed to be winning over his anxiety at this point, as he hadn’t yet started to panic.

Taking hold of her power again, she _stepped_ down, appearing right next to Aiden, who squawked ungracefully, nearly toppling over.

Grabbing hold of his sleeve with her free hand - having tucked the transformer beneath her other arm - she stopped him from face-planting, tugging him back to his feet, where he took a few very dramatic seconds to regather his composure, very pointedly not looking at her.

She wanted to laugh, but that’d almost be mean. She just smothered the smile before it could crease across her face and tugged on Aiden’s sleeve again, guiding him back towards the stairs. There, she sat down, bringing the transformer around and slotting it between her legs, Aiden settling down next to her on the concrete steps.

“What’re you doing?” Aiden asked, pressing his cheek into her shoulder.

Shrugging out of her backpack again, she rearranged it so the open mouth would sit just next to her, letting her pluck her tools out as she went. Grabbing a set of pliers out from inside, she looked down into the contents, and started looking for where she could break bits off.

“Well, I’m going to be taking this apart to finish that thing I’m building,” she began, reaching inside and clamping the pliers down around a metal protrusion, twisting once, twice, and then finally breaking it off, loosening the grip it had on the copper coils inside.

Aiden said nothing for a few seconds, just breathing quietly next to her. “Tell me?” he tried, voice muffled, a bit frustrated. “Story?”

“Do you want me to tell you about what I’m doing, while I do it?” she asked, because that sounded like what he was trying to get at.

He nodded into her shoulder.

She broke off another piece, loosening it further.

“Okay.”

So she did. As she went through the arduous process of mangling the bit of government-owned infrastructure, she explained what she was doing and, more generally, why. Aiden didn’t say much after she started, only asking for clarification when she’d use a word he didn’t know about, or when certain parts looked interesting to him, but clearly he was fairly interested in her process all the same.

It took ten, maybe fifteen minutes to strip the entire thing down, each new bit of thin metal or copper packed away in her bag as she pried it free. A fairly speedy process, she’d admit, but mostly because a lot of the internal parts of the transformer were held together by bolted bits of metal that resembled tags, fitted together. It took a few hammer whacks to properly break them off, but they bent easily enough anyway.

She’d discarded the torn-up shell of the transformer by the end, leaving it down near her feet as she packed away the bits of unfortunately sharp metal in a way that wouldn’t quite literally stab her in the back the moment she was done.

Pulling the zipper up along her bag, and pressing her hand against where her spine was about to go, she didn't feel any sharp edges that could cut through her bag and into her, just blunted, bumpy protrusions that would probably dig in painfully, if harmlessly. It would have to do.

Nudging Aiden with her shoulder, she glanced his way. “You ready to go?”

He blinked drowsily up at her, pulling away as he started to nod. Well, he’d certainly need a nap when they got back, now wouldn’t he?

Which probably meant she’d have to make a stop at the room, which wasn’t unexpected. She intended to get one of her spare shirts to pad the inside of the mask, as there wouldn’t be much rubber - and rather, a whole lot of uncomfortable metal - pressing against her face once she was completed with it. It’d come to her awareness when she’d actually started putting the pieces away, and how sharp metal probably didn’t mix well with one’s face.

Turning away from both Aiden and her bag, she glanced up and froze.

Movement, from a few houses down: a figure swaying, stumbling, looking barely coherent. The mist obscured their features, what they exactly looked like, but it was definitely a person.

Had they seen her teleport? Did they know someone out here was a cape?

She watched for a few more seconds, and started to get a different impression. The stumbling wasn’t just for show, they seemed genuinely disoriented as they tried to maneuver against a chainlink fence a few houses down, stubbornly bumping into it. They had black stains across their lips. It _could_ be lipstick - the person looked like a woman - but...

Maybe drugs? It’d... make the most sense. It wasn’t like the Merchants disappeared, after Leviathan. If anything, they arguably came out on top in terms of how much damage they took during all the chaos that led up to Leviathan attacking in the first place. If they had new stuff to peddle, it wouldn’t surprise her. It was just that they had been keeping a low profile, or at least she hadn’t heard much about them since.

Either way, she wasn’t about to stick around to find out.

Climbing to her feet, she tugged Aiden up with her, shrugging her backpack on and wincing as the sharp angles bit into her flesh. Unpleasant, but workable, she’d just have to try to not let the bag swing back and forth like it normally did, or she’d be left with some fairly unpleasant cuts.

“C’mon, Aiden,” she murmured, watching as he rubbed at his eyes with both closed fists. Yeah, he needed a nap, she needed to get away from a potential junkie, and she could achieve both of those things by leaving.

Another tug on his sleeve, and they were off.

* * *

Taylor stared down at the finished goggles in her hands. They had come out... well, to put it bluntly, a bit menacing. Metal certainly wasn’t her specialty, and it had left the mask defined by rough, flat planes, resembling the top half of a low-poly skull. The eyes had been recessed a bit into the new shape of the mask, but she’d remedied the dial problem by migrating the controls to only one side, which now controlled the magnification for both lenses. She could still adjust them by hand and independently if she had the tools, which she’d had to do to make sure they were magnified just right for her own eyes.

The rest of the mask was what she was more hopeful about. Her custom-made battery sat on the opposite side of the dial, with a switch just below it to toggle on the new feature she’d built into it. She’d taken a red shirt from her trunk and stripped it down, using it to pad the interior and protect her face from the hard metal edges and bent support beams she’d had to construct to hold the thing’s shape.

She had enough salvage, after all of that, for a good amount of repairs and some upkeep, but she’d need another transformer - or something fairly close to it - if she wanted to make more of it. She was already getting an idea to expand the goggles out into a full mask, as right now they only covered everything from her hairline down to her nose.

Aiden was asleep on her shoulder, having passed out hours ago. He was fairly involved in the building near the start, but the need to nap had quickly overcome him, and he’d clocked out not long after she’d gotten into making the small pieces to reroute the magnification controls.

She looked away from her goggles, skyward, up into the night. They were outside, tucked away in one of the church’s crannies, away from prying eyes. She hadn’t wanted to risk Cleo walking in on her mid-build during the more precise parts of her building process, so she’d avoided staying in their room, even if it would’ve been more comfortable than sitting on damp grass for the last couple of hours.

It unnerved her how quickly time could pass when she was building, but she had a finished product at this point. She had to put it behind her.

Reaching up, she pulled her glasses from her face, folding the arms together and laying it down on her thigh. She turned the mask around, bringing it up to her face, dragging the band of cloth she was using to keep it anchored to her head over her hair and letting the rubber she’d repurposed into sticky pads cling to her cheekbones. It fit perfectly, exactly to the dimensions of her face, and didn’t even really feel like it was there when she finally let go and let it rest without the added support of her hands.

Reaching up, she brought her index finger up against the dial, rolling it. Her zoom amplified, narrowing it down until she could see the grass in more detail than she ever really wanted to. She spun the dial back, correcting the lenses to normal sight.

Now time for the real, untested part of this entire thing.

She moved her hand to the other side of her head, brushed her fingers across the crude battery, and flicked the switch just below it. Her lenses clicked, _whirred_ as they adjusted minutely and electricity was fed wholesale into the interference pattern she’d inscribed across them. For a second, the world remained the same, and then it almost dimmed as her goggles began picking up new signatures.

Craning her head around, she stared back at the building behind her, at the spiderweb of cables, full of electricity, running through it. Behind those were people, most of them laying down, and beyond that there were a few who were sitting up or standing, even despite the time. By her estimate and what felt like some basic intuition, her see-through-walls couldn’t reach further than fifty feet, but for what it was?

It worked.

Reaching up, she touched the battery, already quickly heating up. She dragged her fingers down, flipping the switch; the lenses readjusting, whirring and clicking as her sight returned to normal.

Her battery was an unfortunate piece of barely-functioning work. Whatever her specialty was, it wasn’t energy storage, and her power had been immensely reluctant to play along. What that meant was that it was at a high risk of overheating if she left it on for longer than thirty seconds at a time, and she’d built in a temperature gauge to automatically flick the switch in the event it was reaching ‘could explode’ levels. After that, she’d need to wait a bit for the heat to disperse, not very long, but it still gave her limits to how much she could use it.

Not to mention the battery itself was going to have to be charged with a raw copper wire that sparked and hissed when she had done it the first time. Not that she’d have to charge it too soon—she had another thirty hours of use out of it before she’d need to—but it was still going to be an unpleasant experience.

Again, if she could just get her hands on a cellphone or something, she’d be in much better condition. A battery from that would be a godsend, as she might be able to just outright use the charger the phone came with to keep the entire thing powered. It wouldn’t risk exploding on her - well, not normally - and she could have more than fifteen seconds of seeing through walls, and she might even be able to increase the range of the effect by pumping some more electricity into the lenses.

But, well, the only way she’d get a cellphone was if she _stole_ it, and she really didn’t want to do that. Stealing from the government was one thing, stealing from other people was something else entirely. They could have videos, photos, things on it that were cherished, that they could no longer have in person. It could be the only thing they could use to contact their loved ones, and she felt sick to her stomach when she thought about potentially taking that away from someone.

Unfastening the mask from her face, she pulled her glasses back on, plopping the mask down on her knee. She rocked her head back until she could feel the rough texture of the concrete wall digging into her scalp.

The stars stared down at her. There were so many of them, it felt almost like how she visualized her powers. She’d seen stars like this once, when she went to summer camp, before everything between her, Emma, and seemingly the world at large had gone wrong. Back when things had been better.

When she still had her dad. Still had friends.

They were so small, in comparison.

The past was the past, though. There was no rewinding time; if there had been, she would’ve done so by now. The present was what mattered. Aiden was what mattered.

Tomorrow, she’d go to Leah tomorrow.

Then she could finally start protecting people.


End file.
